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Monitoring lights the way to managing our rivers well. All of us can look at, paddle, or swim in a river and tell a lot about its health. But often, trying to figure out how much life or pollutants there are in a river is a matter of guess-work, unless you have a good tool and standards by which to measure.
 Monitoring can generate data valuable to the whole process of fixing what is broken or protecting what is not. Saving rivers is what we do, so we realize the important role monitoring plays when working to restore and protect rivers. To this end, River Alliance has and continues to support several monitoring projects:
Beginning in 2006, the River Alliance of Wisconsin got involved in creating a statewide volunteer stream monitoring program - Level 2 Stream Monitoring Program - that collects data for the DNR. Citizens use DNR methods and equipment, and then they enter their data in the DNR's database. For more information on this program, visit our Citizen Stream Monitoring page.
Since 2008, the River Alliance has coordinated a monitoring program to detect and do something about the increasing threat to our rivers from invasive species. Visit our Invasive Species page for more information on Project Riverine Early Detectors (RED).
Over the past several years, concern has grown lock-step with the proliferation of dairy CAFOs in Wisconsin. River Alliance has not developed a CAFO monitoring project, but why do something that the Michigan Chapter of Sierra Club has already done a great job of? Information on the ins and outs of this type of monitoring is located on our CAFO Monitoring page.
River Alliance of Wisconsin will be developing a water monitoring plan for the Greater Milwaukee Watersheds as partner to the Southeast Wisconsin Watershed Trust (Sweetwater Trust). Curious? More details are located at our Restoring Rivers, Urban Rivers page.
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