Many citizens, from youth to senior citizens, throughout Missouri are involved as volunteers to learn about and to care for our streams. These volunteers engage in many different types of activities to protect our streams such as litter pickup, streamside tree planting, and water quality monitoring through the Stream Team program.

The Missouri Stream Team program (www.mostreamteam.org) provides an excellent opportunity for anyone wishing to learn about streams and water quality and become a volunteer to help protect our water resource. One day training sessions at various locations are offered for the different levels of the program. The Introductory Workshop focuses on watershed education, biological monitoring and conducting visual surveys of streams. For those interested, more advanced training for chemical testing, improving identification of aquatic macro-invertebrates, etc., is also provided.

Information gathered by volunteer water quality monitors is very useful in helping to establish baseline information on water quality, locating present or potential water quality problems and alerting state agencies about them, and informing and educating others about our streams and the quality of the water in them.

We all need to be involved in protecting our environment and becoming a Stream Team volunteer is an excellent, fun and rewarding way to fulfill this responsibility.

Learn more actions you can take at www.sgrwa.org