Adopt-A-Stream volunteers to monitor river

Wise is Braselton’s environmental specialist — a position that requires managing erosion and sedimentation, enforcing environmental laws through inspections, and advising the town’s planning director about environmental protection and mitigation.

She’s also spearheading Braselton’s new Adopt-A-Stream program.

The lesson she’s trying to spread in town? Everyone plays a role on the impact of the local watershed.

“My own personal hope is that people will see how they impact the watershed and how the results show any negative impact from urban runoff,” Wise said.

A watershed is the land area from which water, sediment, and dissolved materials drain to a common point along a stream, wetland, lake or river. Each watershed in the state is a drainage system that collects rainfall.

In Braselton, the Mulberry River straddles Jackson, Barrow, Gwinnett and Hall counties — all part of the town limits. The river is a drinking water source and center of the town’s Mulberry RiverWalk — a naturalized public trail located behind several neighborhoods.

“I think the Mulberry River is a like a hidden treasure here in Braselton,” Wise said. “People don’t even know it’s there. It’s not a real deep river or a real wild river, but it is pretty and we have that trail.”

With the town’s new Adopt-a-Stream program, volunteers will help monitor the Mulberry River and educate others about water quality.

The Georgia Adopt-A-Stream program encourages individuals and communities to monitor and/or improve sections of streams, wetlands, lakes or estuaries. The program uses manuals and training workshops to certify volunteers.

Allison Hughes, state coordinator of Georgia Adopt-A-Stream, recently conducted the first training workshop in Braselton for volunteers. Overall, the program has 187 active groups in the state with 378 active monitoring sites in 28 watersheds.

The Adopt-A-Stream program has more than 15,000 registered volunteers in Georgia. The new Braselton chapter is starting with 19 volunteers, but welcomes more.

“We have an interactive and educational website where citizens can learn about water quality monitoring, view water quality data in their local watershed and find workshops near them,” Hughes said.

That website — www.GeorgiaAdoptAStream.org — is also where volunteers log the data that they collect in local watersheds. Guests can also learn about monitoring results on the website, too.

Georgia Adopt-A-Stream’s database manager, Rick Hitchcock at the University of Georgia, reviews all data that is submitted to the program, according to Hughes.

“If he notices something unusual with the data, we contact the data collector to discuss the data to determine if there is an issue,” she said. “When a water quality impairment is detected, we advise volunteers to start at the local level and work their way up. Many times, the local government will work with the volunteers to correct the problem.”

As volunteers in Braselton recently learned, some of the measurements they’ll be taking in the Mulberry River will be temperature, pH level, the amount of dissolved oxygen and conductivity.
All of the measurements give an idea of how healthy a stream is for aquatic life.

Changes in conductivity, for example, could point to a sewage spill, an increase in farms dumping waste into the river or excessive urban runoff.

Wise said pesticide on lawns eventually ends up in the watershed, too. The Adopt-A-Stream program is designed to educate everyone in a community how they affect the watershed.

One form of pollution — called nonpoint source of pollution — includes mud, litter, oils and other pollutants being washed into rivers and lakes by stormwater.

“You can’t really point your finger and say, ‘This came from there,’” Wise said. “It comes from all over.”

The new volunteers in Braselton recently completed their certification on chemical monitoring. They’ll take samples of the Mulberry River once a month, starting in August.

The Adopt-A-Stream program also offers certification in other areas. Once certified, volunteers keep that designation for a year. They can visit the program’s website to learn about other certification workshops.

For more information, or to volunteer, e-mail Yvette Wise, Braselton environmental specialist, at ywise@braselton.net.