Volunteer Creek Monitoring Program

The Forum’s Volunteer Creek Monitoring Program is no longer active. If you are looking to get involved in water quality monitoring in Contra Costa County, please reach out to The Watershed Project. The Watershed Project runs an excellent monitoring program that you can read about here.

For information on the Forum’s old creek monitoring programs and to see some of the data that was gathered, please continue reading.

In the early 2000s, the Forum joined forces with the Contra Costa Clean Water Program to monitor and assess creek conditions in Contra Costa County. The Volunteer Creek Monitoring Program assisted community members and local organizations in collecting data on local creeks and watersheds.

The information gathered by volunteers was used for a variety of purposes:

to assess the conditions of Contra Costa County streams
to compare stream health to state water quality standards
to calculate water quality and biological integrity indices
to serve as a baseline for comparison in future studies

An important aspect of the program was performing bioassessments. Creeks are complex ecosystems that are home to many varieties of aquatic life, including fishes, invertebrates, and plants. In order to assess the impacts of our everyday actions on local creeks and watersheds, we used aquatic insects as indicators, a practice known as bioassessment. While water samples alone can yield detailed information about the water at the time of sampling, assessing the abundance and diversity of bugs in our creeks yields a watershed-level perspective of water quality and habitat viability over time. Some organisms are very pollution tolerant, while others are very intolerant. By looking at the populations and diversity of organisms, scientists can learn a lot about the quality of the creek. Unlike chemical water testing, which may be expensive and gives detailed information about the conditions only at the time of sampling, bioassessment integrates overall conditions of a creek over time.

Historic Bioassessment Data

Alhambra Creek Data

Antioch-East Creek Data

Antioch-West Creek Data

Las Trampas Creek Data

Marsh Creek Data

Moraga Creek Data

Mt. Diablo Creek Data

Contra Costa Monitoring and Assessment Program

Preliminary Assessment of Aquatic Life Use Condition in Contra Costa Creeks

Summary of Benthic Macroinvertebrate Bioassessment Results (2007)

Summary of Benthic Macroinvertebrate Bioassessment Results (2008)

GPS Creek Survey Program

While no longer active, the Global Positioning System (GPS) Creek Survey Program established protocols that combined the precision of GPS technology with the detail of traditional creek surveys. Unlike GPS car navigational systems that identify locations on a map, the GPS Creek Survey Program surveys helped to improve existing and new maps.

Using GPS technology, volunteers monitored the conditions of their neighborhood creeks. In the summer and fall, adventurous volunteers waded into local creeks, mapping the physical attributes of the stream channel (substrate, canopy cover, bank characteristics, etc.), extent and type of native and invasive vegetation, and human influences (outfalls, dams, etc.). By walking the creek channels in the County, volunteers documented many different aspects of the channels that were too fine to detect on aerial photographs. As volunteers walked through the creeks, observing the habitat and man-made structures, they entered information into GPS units. These creek surveys provided information on the state of the creeks, helping to identify sources of pollution and areas for habitat restoration. The scientific data that was collected was used by a number of organizations working to protect and restore our aquatic resources in the Bay Area.