Liquid Assets 2000: What You Can Do

Everyone plays an important role in ensuring clean community waters. By forming watershed partnerships, participating in local government decisions, conserving water, or changing our current practices around the house, we can all make a difference. Citizens in all 50 states are volunteering to assess, monitor, and clean up our waters at record-setting rates. The number of volunteers participating in monitoring and cleanup activities in the United States is now close to half a million.

EPA has resources available to show you how to get started and stay involved. EPA's Adopt Your Watershed (http://www.epa.gov/adopt/) database includes several thousand watershed partnerships and volunteer monitoring organizations that are working nationwide to protect and restore local watersheds. As part of the Adopt Your Watershed campaign, more than 1,500 Girl Scouts nationwide have earned a new Water Drop patch for completing watershed projects in their local communities (http://www.epa.gov/adopt/patch/).

Since 1994 more than 2,700 volunteers in the United States and Canada have participated in the Great American Secchi Dip-In (http://dipin.kent.edu/ ). This volunteer water monitoring effort, which measures water clarity using Secchi disks, was conceived by Dr. Bob Carlson of Kent State University with support from EPA. Reduced clarity can be caused by sedimentation (soil runoff) or by excessive algae growth due to overenrichment from sewage, manure, fertilizers, or atmospheric deposition.

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