On a cold Sunday morning, a team of citizen scientists are working to restore Lolo Creek southwest of Missoula. The citizen scientist group (AKA Stream Team) is organized by Missoula’s Watershed Education Network (WEN), which has a mission to study, preserve, and educate.
WEN Program Coordinator Rebecca Pacquette and University of Montana Aquatic Wildlife Biology Major Jeremy Brooks are leading six volunteers on the first trip of the season to Lolo Creek.
"Alrighty, let’s do this," says Pacquette. "Feel free to jump into any rig. I won’t be offended."
Since the 2013 Lolo Complex fire burned nearly 11,000 acres around the creek, citizen scientists have played an important role in monitoring water quality. Pacquette explains why sedimentation is a concern as she hands out neoprene waders to her volunteers on the side of Highway 12.
"If we’re finding there is a lot of settling of fine sediments in a riffle, that’s a sign that there is a lot of fine sediment in a stream," says Pacquette. "Excessive amounts of sediments around pools can be alarming. There should be a good mixture of grain sizes in a healthy stream system."
When a streambank loses its vegetation from a wildfire, it can become destabilized, which can cause excessive erosion, affect water levels and even change flows. These alterations can often result in an increase of pollutants and suspended fine sediment in the water, which are harmful to aquatic ecosystems.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) awarded the Lolo Watershed Group $10,000 in 2009 to develop a restoration plan that was completed in 2013. As the primary coordinator of Lolo Creek restoration efforts, it has teamed up with WEN and other local watershed groups like the Clark Fork Coalition to plant native vegetation along burned areas to stabilize streambanks last spring. According to Katie Steele of the DEQ, this collaboration brings in local resources that are crucial for the Lolo Watershed Group’s ability to meet its goals.
"They’re not doing this work because they have to; they're doing it because they want to," says Steele. "They really are taking big strides forward just kind of on faith that they’ll have the support that they need from their community and from the state. We see that collaboration happening in an organic way in the Lolo Watershed, and it’s just good for everyone and the environment.”
Volunteers carefully wade into the water and walk downstream to find the first riffle site. They measure the distance of the riffle and break it into equal horizontal slices. A volunteer crosses each slice of the creek and leans down to extract 25 rocks at random to take a measurement. Whether it is a handful of sand or a 150-millimeter behemoth, they shout out their observations to Pacquette who records the data.
Collectively, these data sets help Lolo Creek researchers understand how creek sediment has changed since the fire and whether restoration efforts are making a difference. It can be slippery and shiver-inducing work, but it can help students like Maggie Burnham get experience for the future.
"Well, I’m thinking that since I’m going into that, Stream Team is going to be mostly what I am going to be doing for the first like, at least, five years of my career is just monitoring and going outside, so it's important to get experience doing that," says Burnham.
Stream Team will continue to monitor Lolo Creek and other projects for rest of the season.
Noah Rott is a journalism student at the Univeristy of Montana
