Helping others appreciate the importance of healthy streams and how human actions impact stream conditions is one of the most valuable uses of macroinvertebrate collection and monitoring. If you go through the trouble of putting together a full monitoring program with dozens of samples, hundreds of hours of time, and thousands of dollars in costs, why not make every effort (through media, workshops, field trips, talks) to share that information with any who may have an interest in the watershed.

Taking students of all ages to a stream to learn about the life under the rocks can be done with little expertise. In this section, we provide an inexpensive and simple option for sampling macroinvertebrates as well as some information to help make sense of what you saw.

Other macroinvertebrate monitoring resources for education:

• SWRP (Student Watershed Research Project) - great local resource
  http://www.swrp.org/home.html
• Isaac Walton League's SOS (Save Our Streams) Program
  http://www.iwla.org/sos/
• The Adopt-A-Stream Foundation's Streamkeeper Program
  http://www.streamkeeper.org/

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