Are you concerned about the water quality in your local stream, river or lake?

Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance is recruiting volunteers for our Winnebago Waterways program, Connecting Our Waters program and our partners at the Wisconsin DNR to monitor water quality in streams and lakes at several sites throughout the Fox-Wolf Basin.

You do not need to live on the water to consider volunteering for this program! The map to the right shows the locations in need of volunteers.

Monitoring begins in May. We provide the equipment and the training, all we need is your time! Learn more below.

If you are interested in volunteering, please contact Emily Henrigillis: emily@fwwa.org or 920-851-6472. 

Water Quality Monitoring Stations:

Map Key:
Yellow points are in-lake sites
Purple points are stream sites

In-lake water quality monitoring program:

The specific lakes we are hoping to gain volunteer monitors on are: Lake Winnebago, Pleasant Lake, Pella Pond, White Clay Lake, and Washington Lake. All lakes, aside from Lake Winnebago, are present within Shawano County. We are also hoping to expand on the work done by the WDNR for the Wolf River Management Plan, so we are looking for volunteers to monitor the Balsam Row Pond.

In-lake water quality monitoring will follow the WDNR CLMN monitoring protocol. This means that a volunteer would need to take a Secchi disk depth reading every 10-14 days starting in May and ending in October. During these sample events, volunteers would also sample dissolved oxygen and temperature with a digital probe.

More detailed information can be found here: You can find more information here: https://dnr.wi.gov/lakes/CLMN/qualityassurance/CLMNQAPP2010.pdf

We would supply the training, sampling equipment, and the exact location to help guide you to the water quality point.

Tributary Monitoring Program:

A TMDL study was conducted for the Upper Fox-Wolf Watershed and as a part of that study, watersheds were identified as having different priorities regarding sediment loading, restoration needed, etc.

Tributary monitoring will follow the WAV monitoring protocol but you will also learn how to use a probe to collect temperature and DO information. Volunteers would need to commit to six sampling events a year – one sample every month from May to October. Volunteers are able to take on more than one site, if interested and depending on availability. At each location the follow parameters would be measured: temperature, dissolved oxygen, streamflow, transparency, habitat, and the biotic index.

More detailed information about sampling can be found here: http://watermonitoring.uwex.edu/wav/monitoring/index.html

We would supply the training, sampling equipment, and information to help guide you to the sampling locations.

Read more on the Upper Fox-Wolf Watershed TMDL here: https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/tmdls/foxwolf/index.html

If you live in areas that we did not list but one of these programs is of interest to you, please still contact us!

Volunteers are needed statewide to help monitor the water around us.

If you are interested in volunteering, please contact Emily Henrigillis: emily@fwwa.org or 920-851-6472.