Stream Monitoring

 
The Cutthroats of Carpenter Creek was formed in 1998 as a program of Stillwaters Environmental Education Center. In 2001, they began monitoring Carpenter Creek's water quality and flow.  Water quality data collected monthly by volunteers include temperature, conductivity, salinity, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, nitrates, phosphates, and fecal coliform.  

This long-term data set is extremely valuable for understanding our watershed and how it is changing, particularly with population growth in the area. The data is also a great resource for our interns and for local college students needing data sets for class projects.  Fawn Harris, who had interned with Stillwaters as an undergrad and then joined our staff as monitoring assistant, used our stream data in her Masters degree project at Evergreen College (2017; available here).

In summer 2022,  Jeremy Leung compared our data on stream temperature and flows with other creeks monitored in Kitsap County to evaluated their suitability for salmon rearing.  His comparison highlights the importance of stream flows in maintaining summer temperatures at levels acceptable for growing salmon and illustrates the important role we all have in cooling and maintaining stream flows by diverting roof runoff to rain gardens, protecting wetlands (even seasonal ones) on our properties, and/or maintaining vegetation (and restoring native vegetation) shading streams.  The pdf below (scroll on image to advance) is a presentation Jeremy did on his project.  A Kitsap Community News article about his project can be found here.