New volunteers of the Nansemond River Preservation Alliance, and some guests from neighboring cities, came out to learn about proper water quality monitoring at the preservation alliance’s meeting held on Wednesday.

“If you don’t do monitoring, you don’t know if there’s a problem,” said James Beckley, waterway quality coordinator for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

The alliance has been collecting water quality data from eight different locations along the Nansemond River for the past three years, said Elizabeth Taraski, executive director of the Nansemond River Preservation Alliance. Every other year, the alliance generates a report on the river’s water quality.

There are a number of waterways in Virginia and they are all constantly changing, Taraski said.

“They rely on citizen groups to collect data and to be another set of eyes,” she said. There are about 180 groups in Virginia working to monitor their local waterways.

At the meeting, the new volunteers learned about some of the different bacteria that can be harmful, such as E. coli and fecal coliform. E. coli comes from the stomachs of birds, mammals and humans, Beckley said. Due to the local wildlife, however, the water will likely always have a certain level of these, he added. “We (have) got to account for those natural levels,” Beckley said of the animals’ waste.

Because this area has oysters and other shellfish, it’s particularly important to ensure the water quality is good, Taraski said. When people eat raw oysters, there is no opportunity for the bacteria to be cooked out and killed. This can cause people to get sick, she added.

Some of the tests the group will be doing include the pH-balance, water temperature, oxygen levels and more.

Typically, Beckley said, citizens will collect the water from off of a bridge, a boat or a stream bank. There are a few different devices used to test the water, such as a Secchi disc and a dipping stick. When the Secchi disk, or other similar device, is placed in the water a person looks down to see how far down they can still see it. With this particular test, one can see how clear the water is and get an idea of how much sunlight the plants in the water are currently receiving, Beckley said. The dipping stick allows a volunteer to reach down into the water and cup out a sample.

Samples should be taken from the surface of the water and recorded in the metric system, Beckley said. Another important component to proper water quality testing is that if a person must wait more than 15 minutes before testing the sample, the bottle or tube should be placed in ice, Beckley said. This is to protect the bacteria from growing or dying and therefore affecting the accuracy of the data.

Visit www.nansemondriverpreservationalliance.org for more information on water quality or volunteering to monitor it.