Riverwatch for the Classroom

National Great Rivers is home to the highly successful Illinois RiverWatch program, and our RiverWatch Team is developing materials for you to bring RiverWatch to your classroom starting in 2025.  We will provide appropriate curricula and materials for middle school, high school and undergraduate students, including materials that can be utilized in an online setting.

RiverWatch is a community science program that trains volunteers to collect and identify macroinvertebrates, which are small animals without a backbone.  Macroinvertebrates are excellent indicators of water quality because they vary in their sensitivity to pollution in the water, so which species are present and how abundant they are tells us a lot about the condition of the water they live in.

More information will be posted soon!