The 2025 water quality monitoring season has begun! At the start of each season Monitoring Montana Waters (MMW) provides in person training for volunteer water quality monitoring groups to ensure each group feels confident in their abilities to collect scientifically credible water quality samples. To kick off the sampling season, MMW traveled to Lewistown to host a training event for Central Montana Resource Council (CMRC). Members of CMRC had the opportunity to practice sampling for unfiltered and filtered samples, as well as discuss the importance and procedures for field blanks, duplicates, and the COC form. MMW also met with citizen scientists from Flathead Rivers Alliance to prepare them to monitor water quality on the Three Forks of the Flathead Wild and Scenic River.
Monitoring Montana Waters, Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and MSU Extension Water Quality Program (MSUEWQ) also hosted a water quality monitoring training event at the Flathead Lake Biological Station (FLBS) from May 14-16. Participants from water monitoring groups, conservation districts and volunteer groups throughout the state came to learn more about the importance of water monitoring and develop new skills to improve their current efforts. Participants had the option of choosing to attend focused workshops on developing and refining monitoring programs or get more experience with hands on data analysis on Wednesday. The following day was spent outside rotating between training stations that included topics on macroinvertebrates and algae, riparian health, basic lake monitoring, water chemistry, measuring discharge, as well as how to calibrate, use and care for different water quality probes like YSI meters and Hydrolabs. Experts from MT DEQ, FLBS, and MSU Extension led each station on Yellow Bay Creek. The last day of the training focused on interpreting water quality data and highlighted success stories of sharing results with the public.
MMW continued to provide training by visiting the Yaak Valley Forest Council in Troy and the Bitterroot River Protection Association in Victor to do group training events and go over grab and filtered sample collection methods. MMW travels to each watershed and provides in-person training for groups as needed. This is a great opportunity for us to connect and spend quality time in-person with our volunteers, who we primarily communicate with via email, phone or zoom. We are so appreciative of our volunteers and want to do all we can to make them feel confident when collecting data.
