Monitoring efforts frequently take a back seat when it comes to work and funding priorities, but one way to accomplish national forest watershed monitoring is to work alongside eager volunteers recruited from local elementary school, high school, and college students. That's how the Eldorado NF was able to monitor streams in five watersheds this fall. The benefits and rewards from this team effort were many. Information obtained will be utilized not only in the local Eldorado National Forest stream survey database, but will fit right into the region's Stream Condition Inventory database and the Water Module of the National Natural Resource Information System database. This experience provided an opportunity for students to learn watershed monitoring techniques, and be exposed to natural resource career choices. Students were asked to apply their practical classroom learning in real world challenges, which significantly reinforced their learning experiences. Teachers were also rewarded by working alongside a Forest Service hydrologist, fish biologist, wildlife biologist, and forester, as well as teachers from other schools and specialists from other agencies. As one Oakridge teacher put it, "The role of the teacher changes from 'sage on the stage' to 'guide by the side'."

To start off, a teacher training and quality assurance/quality control equipment calibration session was held to get teachers familiar with new technologies and protocols that would be used in the monitoring. Using the R5, USFS Stream Condition Inventory protocol, selected monitoring techniques taught included: stream cross-sections, gradients, water flow and velocity, substrate pebble counting, macroinvertebrate sampling, shade measurement, Global Position Satellite data collection, water chemistry testing, measurement of pooltail sediment, and computer data entry using laptops. Partners Brian Deason from El Dorado Resource Conservation District and Dominic Gregario from the CA Dept of Water Quality were very instrumental in helping us make this a big success.

The third annual "Watershed Education Summit" (WES) was held on the Pacific Ranger District's beautiful Crystal Basin area. Forty top students from four local high schools attended the four-day weekend campout. Wench Creek was the training stream site on the first day, led by USFS hydrologist Christine Mai, fish biologist Jann Williams, wildlife biologist Jennifer Ebert, forester Jeff Mai, and Brian Deason from El Dorado Resource Conservation District. On successive days Jones Fork Silver Creek and South Fork Rubicon River were monitored by this energetic group of students, overseen closely by their science instructors and Forest Service specialists.

The second annual two-day monitoring event was conducted with college professor Kurt Coffman from Cosumnes River College. Approximately 20 students from his ecology class came out and monitored most of the same stream reach characteristics as the high schools within a stream reach in the Big Silver Watershed. Another second annual three-day monitoring event was made possible through Gold Trail School with 90 students from Janet Cohen's 6th grade science classes. These young students also eagerly and conscientiously took on the same monitoring tasks as the high school and college students. They made a daily two-hour drive to South Fork Long Canyon on the Georgetown Ranger District to learn how to measure the aquatic habitats they were studying about in the classroom.

There were many rewards associated with all of these monitoring efforts, but none compared to the bright smiles and happy faces of students and instructors in hip waders, splashing across the stream, understanding they are contributing to our understanding of local watershed health.