Prairie Water Care

Prairie Water Care is an educational, hands-on program for volunteers interested in learning about water quality issues in their local watersheds. Landowners, local community associations, cottage owners, 4-H groups, students and others are encouraged to develop watershed stewardship groups in their communities to monitor water quality, assess watershed health and promote sustainable land management practices.

The Prairie Water Care Stewardship Program will provide awareness, education and an opportunity for local communities, producers and government agencies to work together towards a common goal of ensuring the health of our watersheds.

How do we do this?

• By conducting workshops to train volunteers in water quality monitoring, riparian (streambank) health assessment and macro invertebrate identification in order to assess the health of their local watershed.
• By encouraging local residents to form local watershed groups that will work together with community groups and local landowners to implement conservation activities within their watershed.
• By developing a data base of watershed conditions so that volunteers will have an early warning detection system in place to identify potential problem areas.

What will you learn?

• The difference between good and poor water quality, and healthy and unhealthy riparian areas.
• What other landowners and communities are doing to protect their watersheds.
• How to recognize key elements of riparian areas; hydrology, soil and vegetation, as they pertain to water quality and learn to identify eight water quality parameters–nitrates, dissolved oxygen. fecal coliforms, temperature, phosphates, turbidity, pH, and total dissolved solids.

How many Prairie Water Care Monitoring Groups are there?

There are 13 groups:

• Beaver Creek
• Crescent Creek
• Crescent Creek Downstream
• Saskatoon Catholic School (Eagle Creek)
• Goodspirit Lake
• Laura Multiple 4-H Club (Eagle Creek)
• Lac Pelletier
• Jackfish / Murray Lake
• Swift Current Creek
• Swift Current Creek Downstream
• The Pas, Manitoba (Carrot River) and
• Wakamaw Valley Authority (Moose Jaw River)

For further information on Prairie Water Care please contact Jody Oliver at the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority at 933-7654 or E-mail her at jody.oliver@swa.ca