NEWPORT, R.I. – Jameson Chace, associate professor of biology and biomedical sciences, will give a public presentation, “Aquidneck Island Watershed Monitoring: A Partnership Project,” on Wednesday, April 25 from 4-5 p.m.
Free and open to the public, the presentation will be given in McKillop Library on the Salve Regina campus. A reception will follow his presentation.
Aquidneck Island is home to 70,000 people, and they all drink treated surface water. Unfortunately those surface waterways are listed as “impaired” under the EPA Clean Water Act, due to high bacteria concentrations, high levels of nutrients (nitrates and phosphates), and in some cases, heavy metals.
In the fall 2009, Salve Regina formed a partnership with the Aquidneck Island Watershed Council to implement a citizen-science watershed monitoring program across Aquidneck Island.
The following year, Chace received the university’s M. Therese Antone Special Projects Award to support Salve Regina’s partnership with the Watershed Council. This award enabled Chace and his students to conduct bimonthly monitoring of local waterways, expand the number of testing sites, and ensure that the bacteria sampling is both handled correctly and processed accurately.
Salve Regina students, who have become community leaders on this project, also train new volunteers, catalog data, assist in running the annual watershed conference, and have the opportunity to use those data for senior theses and for presentations at local and regional conferences.
Chace is an avian ecologist with interests in biogeography, habitat selection, behavioral ecology, population biology, and landscape ecology.