Interactive Mapping:   The River Monitor

The River Monitor is an interactive mapping site, designed by Vertices, that allows you to view the South Branch Watershed Association's volunteer biological river monitoring data collection online in an innovative hands-on way. Instead of viewing traditional tables of numbers, you can navigate your way around the map to view the Association’s monitoring data in graph form, along with photos of each monitoring site and other features within the watershed, such as land use/land cover, streets, highways, municipal boundaries, streams, and lakes. The distance between two points can be measured and the area for a location can be determined as well. Have fun learning about the South Branch Raritan River watershed and bring a friend or two along for the journey!

About SBWA’s Monitoring Program

The South Branch Watershed Association began their volunteer biological river monitoring program in 1994 to obtain and document baseline water quality conditions in the South Branch Raritan River watershed. Currently, there are 18 sampling sites throughout the watershed, which are sampled once a year during the last two weeks of June by trained volunteers.

Macroinvertebrates are the organisms being monitored to study trends in the water quality throughout the watershed. The organisms are invertebrates (no backbones) that are large enough to be seen with the naked eye that live on the bottom of streams and rivers, such as aquatic insects, worms, clams, snails, and crustaceans. Macroinvertebrates have been used for over 100 years to study the health of aquatic ecosystems. Analysis of their communities is a reliable and cost effective approach to water quality monitoring for several reasons: they are good indicators of local conditions because they do not move around much, they integrate the effects of short-term and long-term environmental variations, are abundant in most streams, and are also used by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the federal Environmental Protection Agency for their monitoring efforts.

The samples are taken with a kick net, placed in ethanol, and taken to a lab for analysis to the species level. The results are then presented at the Association’s annual Volunteer Biological Monitoring Conference.