New Pioneers partnered with the Loretto Community this Spring to offer a free, hands-on Stream Sampler Training through the Kentucky Watershed Watch program! This unique opportunity brought together teachers, community leaders, and local youth to become "citizen scientists" by monitoring, testing, and observing our local streams.

Before this in-person training, all attendees completed five online modules to introduce them to Kentucky Watershed Watch (KWW) and their monitoring processes. This prepared them to dive right into the experience at the Loretto Motherhouse Farm!

We started the afternoon with a quick overview of New Pioneers, the Loretto Community, and KWW. Then, New Pioneers led participants in identifying local streams to sample, finding their local Support Hub, and practicing their water chemistry analysis skills! This included testing the temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and E.Coli concentrations of a stream on site.

Then, participants actually got to "get their feet wet" with a trip to the tested stream, making observations with their five senses. Through this training, attendees got the full stream monitoring experience and are now ready to monitor on their own!

Each stream sample unlocks critical data in understanding and protecting Kentucky's rich and abundant waterways! In fact, all samplers will submit their monitoring data to a statewide database, accessible by the Division of Water and other crucial water organizations, helping them identify any areas of concern.

We thank the Kentucky Watershed Watch, Loretto Community, and all of our wonderful participants for this impactful training! You can learn more about KWW here: https://www.kywater.org/

To view more photos from this training, click here or on the collage above.