Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership Corporation

The LRWP’s growing community of civic scientists — or Streamkeepers — help implement water quality monitoring efforts at sites across our watershed. The primary goal of this monitoring is to gather and report data, evaluate the health of area streams, and measure the impact of stream restoration projects and stormwater management.

Our committed Streamkeepers are the eyes and ears of our waterways. They fill out forms, take photos, identify opportunities for restoration, coordinate clean-ups, share stories of their streams, and give a “voice” to our waterways. Regular monitoring of our streams would be impossible without their commitment!

LRWP Streamkeepers are required to go through a training in Visual Habitat Assessments and Macroinvertebrate Monitoring. Once trained they can “check out” monitoring supplies from our lending library for regular data gathering and field study.

While the LRWP is happy to train and support Streamkeepers for any stream in the watershed, we are especially interested in working with volunteers to assist with on-going monitoring of the 33 key headwater streams.

The LRWP is part of a team working with NJDEP funding and technical assistance to develop a comprehensive coastal resilience plan for our Lower Raritan Watershed communities. Other team members include Middlesex County Office of Planning, Old Bridge, Perth Amboy, Sayreville, South River and Woodbridge. We seek to ensure that our central New Jersey landscape is better able to handle the impacts of climate change, sea level rise and future storms. Our work involves community engagement, data gathering, planning, restoration and much more.

“Preparing for climate change is imperative and should be at the forefront of our coastal communities across the nation but we will not protect our coast lines with only sea walls and tide gates. This alternative is shortsighted, will have dire environmental consequences, and may result in increased damages from failure.

Coastal resilience must be looked at holistically and regionally. We must include engineering, nature-based, economic, and social solutions to successfully mitigate long term-impacts. Coastal states and communities must focus on developing the capacity for regional coastal resilience management plans that integrate businesses, communities, non-profits, academic institutions, and government (at all levels). Without proper stakeholder engagement, coordination, and participation our proposals will continue to fall short of what is needed to prepare for sea level rise.”

#lookfortheriver inspires care for neglected waterways in the context of climate change, intensified urban flooding and sea level rise. It is a transformative climate justice campaign and social movement that empowers geographically and socio-economically vulnerable populations to value and restore freshwater ecosystems and the environment as community care and resilience. Working at multiple scales it involves local streamside actions of knowledge co-production, performances of climate change impacts and proposed solutions, art installations that pattern regional stewardship and adaptation, engagement with national circuits of knowledge and practice, and connection with global movements that embrace water as the lifeblood of our communities.

As a campaign #lookfortheriver transforms community-environment connectivity through knowledge co-production and the arts and cultivates cultures of on-going environmental stewardship.

As a social movement #lookfortheriver advances a cross-scales theory of landscape change and resilience.

At all scales work is conceived and articulated in non-economic terms of shared health, prosperity and well-being.

Running for 20 weeks through Summer 2019, the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership and Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Middlesex County (RCE) will gather data and other information on water quality for public access sites along the tidal portions of the Raritan River at locations considered non-bathing beaches. This project is supported through grants from the Interstate Environmental Commission (IEC) and Rutgers’ Sustainable Raritan River Initiative (SRRI).

LRWP and RCE will monitor non-bathing beach sites with active kayak/canoe launches and/or fishing and other primary contact activities that, as non-bathing beach sites, are not regularly monitored by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) or the New Jersey Department of Health and Human Services and lack sufficient water quality data.

In addition to yielding important data about the health and safety of our waterways, the Project will also allow for development of civic science and expanded volunteer environmental monitoring programming within the Lower Raritan Watershed and Middlesex County, NJ. We are working with an approved Quality Assurance Project Plan (QAPP), provided by the IEC, which will allow for data generated from this project to inform water quality policy and regulatory decisions at all levels of government within the project area, and to educate the public about the safety of recreating on the River.

Real-time reporting of enteroccocus data will be posted every Friday on the LRWP facebook page and website, and through the New York City Water Trail Association’s citizen’s water quality testing program. Users will be able to easily interpret the data as being above or below the recommended water quality standards for primary contact recreation.