The Washington Post, April 21, 1999 Pb01

The Washington Post, April 21, 1999 pB01

A Natural Solution: Enviro-Volunteers; Busy Researchers Rely on Unpaid Help to Keep Tabs on Frogs, Assess Streams. (Metro) D'Vera Cohn.

Lake Artemesia is pink with sunset when a few lovelorn frogs begin to sing. A pair of beavers swim silently from their den. Clots of gnats rise up, and a hungry bat swoops to meet them.

But the rules say not to begin until dark. So only when the sky turns to black does Kate Spencer pull out her clipboard and waterproof pen and sit cross-legged on the ground to listen for frogs.

By now, the piercing whistle of spring peepers and the snoring rumble of leopard frogs compete with the metallic whoosh of Metro trains heading in and out of the College Park station next to the park.

Spencer's data sheet offers a zero-to-three frog-noise rating scale, from silence to "a blur of sound."

"I'd say peeper intensity is `2' -- `Some overlap of call,' " Spencer says.

Spencer is not out here in the dark just because she loves frogs. Her frog notes eventually will help scientists assess the health of the nation's amphibian population.

Increasingly, large-scale environmental research relies on such unpaid helpers to provide a breadth of coverage that otherwise would be too expensive. Thousands of Americans have signed up to spot backyard birds, count bugs in streams, or look for wildlife in their neighborhoods. Such newer projects join long-established volunteer weather-watcher programs and annual bird surveys.

But there is another goal beyond mere information. Although scientists covet the data, some organizers say their main intent is to build a constituency for the environment.

"I think their greatest value is the involvement of citizens," Diane Hoffman, administrator of the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District, says of volunteer programs in general. "To me, that is just as important as the data."

Spencer is a volunteer for Frogwatch, which is assembling a national database of frog populations. She listens for the prescribed three minutes once or twice a week, then files her reports over the Internet to a computer at the federal Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel. Frogwatch, which began this year, was spurred by alarming reports of declining amphibian numbers around the world.

It will take years to gather enough information to be certain about trends, and it could not be done without volunteers like Spencer, who is 29 and lives a few blocks from the lake.

As a child in Arlington, Spencer read field guides instead of comic books. She received a college degree in biology. Much of her work as a freelance artist is for the National Museum of Natural History, illustrating scientific specimens.

She volunteered for Frogwatch because she wants to learn more about frogs, but another part of her motivation is political. She has joined a group trying to save a 130-acre patch of wetlands near the Greenbelt Metro station from being developed. She hopes the frog count will provide evidence of the wetland's rich ecology and help the case against its conversion to a site for homes and commercial buildings.

As she waits for the sun to drop, Spencer wades into Lake Artemesia in knee-high rubber boots just for the fun of it. She plunges her bare hands into the muck, brings up a startled frog and then a squirming water snake.

"You just gotta look," she says. "There are so many things to see!"

Dishpans, ice cube trays, microscopes, aquatic macroinvertebrate identification guides, tweezers. These are their tools.

Today's task is to assess water quality at one spot along Sandy Run, a creek off Clifton Road in southwestern Fairfax County. The county has just launched a two-year study of stream pollution, depending heavily on volunteers such as those on this team to supplement the work of professionals.

Montgomery County has had a similar program for seven years. Data collected by volunteers help officials assess water quality in Maryland, Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay. Virginia even hired a volunteer coordinator last year to work with the increasing number of citizen-scientists who monitor 450 stream sites, 80 of them in Northern Virginia.

"It's kind of an impossible task to think we can go out and do all the streams and rivers," says the Virginia coordinator, Stacy Brown, who works for the Department of Environmental Quality. "We can get the major ones. That is where citizens can really help to fill in the gaps."

At Sandy Run, the afternoon was sunny and mild -- a perfect day to count bugs. Volunteers are told not to go out during or immediately after storms, partly because of the safety risk from flooding. (So far, the liability issue has not restrained the growth of volunteer monitoring, but some see it coming.)

The rookie at Sandy Run is Bob Slusser, who lives near Mount Vernon in Fairfax County. Self-employed and 59 years old, he is making a career change -- studying natural resource management at a Virginia Tech center in Falls Church, where he heard about stream monitoring.

It sounded, he says, like a good way to learn a few things.

But it is not easy. Unlike the three-minute frog watches, a stream assessment takes three hours and three people. Volunteers must measure the acidity of a stream, be able to distinguish between "sub-optimal" and "marginal" bank erosion and learn to identify more than a dozen types of aquatic insects.

Scientific protocol must be obeyed if the data is to have credibility with scientists. Volunteer monitoring groups -- here, the major ones are the Audubon Naturalist Society and the Izaak Walton League -- now have "quality assurance" programs. Team leaders must pass an insect identification quiz each year.

In a few cases, when volunteer-collected information looks so weird it could not be true, it is quietly thrown out. But volunteers are never, ever fired.

"You work with people to help them to be better," says Hoffman, from the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District. "I'm guessing that if someone were truly struggling, they would make their own decision that this is not what they want to do."

A stream watcher does not just dip the net into the water any old way. One person positions the net. A second picks up nearby rocks to dislodge insects, and paddles water through the net. A third times them for exactly one minute.

Which is why Slusser finds himself crouching in Sandy Run, his feet in high rubber boots, his hands in yellow kitchen gloves, shaking insects off rocks. Mardy Hammond, a biology student at George Mason University, wields the net. Team leader Cliff Fairweather, who works for the Audubon Naturalist Society, tracks the time and gives them tips on on netting technique.

"Now comes the fun part," Slusser says, clambering out of the stream. He makes slurping sounds as if he can not wait to eat what he's caught -- a little stream-sampling joke.

Their section of Sandy Run is not especially rich, but it's not poor either. The day's haul of several dozen specimens includes a three-tailed damsel fly, a flat-headed may fly, gelatinous snail eggs and black fly larva. Unfortunately, it also includes more than a dozen blood-red midges, a species that thrives when there is too little oxygen for others to survive.

"I've got three of those hemoglobin midges, which I don't like," Slusser says.

"Try not to take it so personally, Bob," jokes Fairweather.

After they finish, the volunteers carefully dump the living insects they found back into Sandy Run. Their policy is to have as little impact as possible on the natural world. Many volunteers also grow increasingly fond of the tiny inhabitants of the stream.

"The more you watch these things, the more respect you get for them," Hammond says. "Except for black fly larva."

A volunteer does not have to be able to identify black fly larva -- or even like them -- to be useful to science. In Virginia, state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries officials need people to count squirrels, birds, deer and other creatures wandering by their homes. Jeff Trollinger, the state's wildlife mapping coordinator, says the information will fill in gaps in the scientists' knowledge of which animals live where.

Betty Ford lives with her family on seven acres off a dirt road in western Loudoun County. She took a state training class last year. She is not an expert naturalist -- she teaches middle-school Spanish classes -- but enjoys looking at the birds at her feeder.

"You don't have to make long trips, hang out in the woods for long periods of time or stay up all night," she says. "This is a wonderful hobby. You just take a lawn chair outside."

She has reported fox, snakes, raccoon, deer, rabbits, and a variety of backyard birds. So far, her most exotic sighting was a crane that had wandered off from a migration experiment at the nearby Airlie environmental center. She was thrilled to spot a red-headed woodpecker just a short walk down the road from her house.

Ford, who is 52, used to own one bird identification book, but her new avocation is expanding her library: She added mammal and butterfly guides to her collection. She began a naturalist's journal, sketching birds she sees at her feeders and writing commentary on her sightings. Her work, she says, gently forces her to pay more attention to the world around her.

Certainly, Ford has noticed worrisome changes in her local environment, as development closes in. Five years ago, she saw pheasants in her field. No more. And she wonders what will happen to the woodpecker she spotted near her house. That land has just been sold to a developer.

"I feel like the city is catching up with us at a really rapid rate," she says. "To have a job where you have to sit down and listen to the birds is a good thing."

HOW TO VOLUNTEER:

There are a variety of opportunities in this region to collect data for scientific projects. They include:

Frogwatch: Call Gideon Lachman, 301-497-5819, e-mail him at , or write to Frogwatch, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, USGS-BRD, 12100 Beech Forest Rd., Laurel, Md. 20708-4038. Frogwatch Web site: www.mp2-pwrc.usgs.gov/frogwatch/.

Stream monitoring is sponsored by several organizations. They include the Chesapeake Bay Alliance, 410-377-6270, and the Audubon Naturalist Society, 301-652-9188, Ext. 3006. Or e-mail your name and address to , or consult the Web site at www.audubonnaturalist.org.

The Save Our Streams program, affiliated in some communities with the Izaak Walton League, can be reached in Maryland at 410-969-0084 or on the Web at www.saveourstreams.org. In Fairfax County, call the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District, 703-324-1460; in other parts of Virginia, contact Jay Gilliam at 540-377-6179, e-mail him at , or consult the Web site at www.sosva.com.

For more information on the wildlife mapping program in Virginia, call Jeff Trollinger at the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, 804-367-8747, or look at the department's Web site: www.dgif.state.va.us/wildlifemapping/index.cfm.

Article CJ57671124