River Ranger
Annual Report

This past year, of 2024, our local River Ranger water quality monitoring program efforts have been wonderful both to ensure that we keep eyes on our river, contribute to community science efforts, and to keep folks involved with volunteer opportunities. It is again thanks to the funding made available through SMRF members, the oversight of the SMRF Staff & Board, and the efforts of our volunteers that we are able to boast about continuing to be one of the most extensive & reliable community science based water quality monitoring groups within the State of Texas!

Trainings

For the year of 2024 we reached a total of 285 volunteers who passed through our training programs to become water quality monitors, which is also consistent to our numbers for the previous few years; of those folks trained by us about 60% were first-time volunteers who wanted to get involved with monitoring water, and the other 40% were returning volunteers who took additional courses in order to deepen their knowledge regarding monitoring the health of waters. Our usual breakdown of who attends our trainings is generally about 1/3 locals who want to join our program and make an impact with these local waterways, about 1/3 neighbors who will not use their skills in San Marcos but who still want to monitor watersheds next door to ours, and about 1/3 out-of-towner’s who travel quite a ways in order to train with us so that they can take their skills back to their own local areas.

Monitoring

Just locally on our San Marcos River our volunteer River Rangers conducted about 400 monitoring events, with most areas upstream being monitored every single week and most downstream sites getting monitored at least once a month. Unfortunately our overall monitoring events on the river did fall slightly since last year due to manufacture & shipping issues causing us to limit just how many new volunteers we could bring on throughout the year; however, it seems that these issues have been resolved and we are looking to catch up by getting more folks involved, especially our downstream neighbors.

The funny thing is that most of our monitors report back to us what they describe as “boring” data just from the fact that our river tends to thankfully stay pretty healthy & balanced, if not unfortunately a little low on overall streamflow. We were however lucky to have more monitors branch out from our usual Standard testing regime by helping us collect data about our Riparian Areas, that border streams & rivers, plus more monitoring of harmful bacteria & nutrient load within the water. We even have a small cadre of volunteers who are helping Texas Stream Team in a pilot project by gathering data in order to help prove to the State of Texas & T.C.E.Q. a brand new methodology of monitoring for E. coli & Enterococcus bacteria.

History

With our future monitoring efforts in mind and looking hopeful, it’s also important to look back in time at where this local water quality monitoring program stated. The San Marcos River Rangers is one of the oldest and one of the largest community science based water quality monitoring groups within the State of Texas, and since the beginning we have been working alongside the Texas Stream Team project in order to have a high level of quality control for how we monitor while also making sure that the data we collect will not just be useful to us locally but can also be publicly available & utilized by anyone.

Our first monitoring record seems to date all the way back to October 01st, 1995 and was an evaluation on the site of the restaurant just upstream of the Spring Lake Dam, which is now Kerbey Lane Cafe but was likely Joe’s Crab Shack back in the day! From that first monitoring event about 6,500 total participants have conducted about 4,500 monitoring events while spending about 6,500 hours sampling and traveled about 100,000 miles in their efforts to volunteer in getting eyes on our local water! In the previous 5 years alone our program has trained about 1,000 new water quality monitors which means that just recently we are responsible for about 1 in every 13 Texas Stream Team monitors alone!

Future

Our goal for 2025 is to step up from our 2024 slump and make sure that we bring new monitors on to our team from our wait-list, and to ensure that we continue to put new equipment into the field so that our ageing supplies are not causing you monitors problems throughout the year. We will work to formalize the onboarding process for new volunteers, and to structure our Riparian Evaluation scheduling for our sites.

With changes to the political climate, we are looking for a diversity of funding sources to ensure that we can have a robust program budget and to secure funding for our staff to continue managing these water quality monitoring efforts.

Thanks

From an amazing history of volunteer oriented service to a hopeful future of developing more volunteers opportunities and a better understanding of our local water our River Ranger program truly is a critical part of what makes the San Marcos River Foundation worthwhile in helping to preserve & protect the San Marcos River. As a final reminder, none of this could be accomplished if we did not have: the amazing support of SMRF members such as yourself, the dedication of our SMRF Staff & Board, the amazing efforts of our many volunteers, and the absolutely wonderful San Marcos River to keep fighting for!

-Adam Berglund