March 2, 2013: Two River Watchers and 13 other volunteers joined River Watch Program Coordinator, Adam Comer, and long-time friend of River Watch, Dave Buzan, for It’s My Park Day, an event in partnership with the Austin Parks Foundation. They divided into two groups and walked along Boggy Creek sampling for benthic macroinvertebrates and picking up trash. Benthic means bottom dwelling. Macro means you can see it with your eye and invertebrate is basically a bug. The abundance and diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates at a site indicates the longer-term quality of the water in a stream. Some of these invertebrates live in the water for up to three years. Most professional water quality monitoring teams sample like River Watch does to create long-term baseline data and then they also sample the biological communities at their sites periodically as well to give a more robust idea of the water quality. Special thanks to Austin Parks Foundation and to David Buzan!
