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The Rivanna River Basin is home to a wealth of stewardship groups working to preserve and protect the watershed. These organizations engage in a range of activities such as stormwater management education, clean energy advocacy, stream monitoring, and tree planting. In regions with an abundance of stewardship activity such as the Rivanna River Basin, it is important that community members and leaders have a clear picture of existing stewardship networks to best leverage available resources.

The Rivanna River Basin is home to a wealth of stewardship groups working to preserve and protect the watershed. These organizations engage in a range of activities such as stormwater management education, clean energy advocacy, stream monitoring, and tree planting. In regions with an abundance of stewardship activity such as the Rivanna River Basin, it is important that community members and leaders have a clear picture of existing stewardship networks to best leverage available resources.

In November 2022, I reported on the high levels of E. coIi in Meade Creek, the stream that flows next to my house. Meade Creek at Meade Park had tested over 3000 MPN (the number of coliform organisms) on a scale that judged 410 MPN to be the outer limit of acceptable.

This past fall, the Lewis & Clark Exploratory Center received grants from Crutchfield and from the Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band to launch our Watershed Filmmaking and Mapping Workshops in 2023. With these workshops, we teach students how to document our rivers and streams, giving hands-on experience at our site at Trevillian’s Creek and on the Rivanna River. Afterwards, we combine the students’ films, words, and measurements into a StoryMap, some of them accessible to the public, depending on the privacy permission of the schools. Schools that want to extend their field trip into the classroom can construct their own StoryMaps with our guidance and examples.

Tadpole Land & Trail Conservancy purchased land bordering Ballenger Creek in Palmyra to form Ballenger Creek Nature Preserve, in July 2021. The 73 acres of land is covered in cascading streams, forest and recovering forest and is diverse with wildflowers, ferns, and cliffs of Mountain Laurel.

I live next to Meade Creek where the stream flows into a culvert underneath Chesapeake Street. It seems as if I hear the water when the windows are open, though the sound is faint on the average day, too faint to register with any definition, but comforting nonetheless. Before the City improved the drainage, I used to enjoy watching the creek rise in a storm. It would churn and escape its banks and threaten to reach the house, though it never did.

There was a mink sighting at Trevillian’s Creek at the Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center at 11 AM on August 17, 2022! Environmental educator Brooke Asher, a retired Albemarle County science teacher, was helping with a stream survey near the Route 20 culvert when she saw the creature dart into the tall grasses.