Listening to Rivers
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Perhaps Heteroclitus wasn’t thinking about the chemistry of rivers when he wrote this almost 2500 years ago, but that is where my mind goes when I read it. By my way of thinking, the chemistry of a river tells a story, but that story is only ever known if the samples are collected that allow the story to be heard.
For over 25 years, I’ve studied rivers around the world, from the Arctic to the Amazon, working with partners to collect the water samples that allow us to tease apart the health of the rivers and how that are changing. The astonishing pace of global change we are now witnessing adds great urgency to our mission. Though we’ve had many successes, the logistical challenges and expense of widespread river sampling has always constrained our ambitions. Then a few years ago I got to know Johnny Le Coq (founder and owner of Fishpond) and John Duncan and Troy Youngfleish (owners of Telluride Angler), and we found that we had a shared passion for doing everything we could to understand, protect, and restore rivers. As we traded stories and shared perspectives, the idea for Science on the Fly began to take shape.
Science on the Fly harnesses enthusiasm, knowledge, geographic reach, and conservation ethic of the fly fishing community to strategically increase the number of rivers that are subject to long-term studies of water quality and watershed health. By collecting monthly water quality samples from their home streams, and then sending those samples to the Woodwell Climate Research Center for analysis, passionate anglers, guides, and fly shops act as citizen scientists, making possible river sampling on a scale that was previously beyond my imagination. All samples are analyzed for a suite of chemical parameters (nitrate, ammonium, phosphate, silica, dissolved organic carbon, total dissolved nitrogen), in addition to measuring water temperature when the samples are collected. These analyses allow us to evaluate current water quality conditions, and importantly, track and respond to improving or deteriorating conditions over time.
We began modestly in mid 2018, sampling just a few streams, but we’ve grown rapidly and now have ongoing sampling at almost 90 sites (see map below). This growth greatly exceeds anything we could have imagined just 18 months ago, and makes us confident that Science on the Fly’s strategy of uniting the fly fishing and science communities is a winning formula.
If you’d like to help, either by sampling or by donating to support our work, please visit scienceonthefly.info or contact me at rmholmes@woodwellclimate.org.
Every river tells a story. Science on the Fly is listening.
Max Holmes is Deputy Director and Senior Scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. If he’s not collecting water samples, he can often be found fly rod in hand, doing his best to “sample” the river’s fish!