Silver City Watershed Keepers

About
The Silver City Watershed Keepers is a volunteer environmental quality monitoring group coordinated by the Gila Resources Information Project (GRIP). Volunteers donate their time and talents to help protect our local Silver City watershed near where they live, work, and play through monitoring and community outreach and education. Their efforts provide quality data and build stewardship of the Silver City watershed.

Silver City Watershed
Watersheds come in all shapes and sizes. A watershed is an area of land that drains all the streams and rainfall to a common outlet such as the outflow of a reservoir, mouth of a bay, or any point along a stream channel. The watershed consists of surface water--lakes, streams, reservoirs, and wetlands--and all the underlying ground water.

The Town of Silver City is located at the lower end of a 38 square mile watershed where Silva Creek and Pinos Altos Creek come together and form San Vicente Creek. Historically, agricultural practices, mining, livestock grazing, deforestation, and urbanization severely impacted the environmental quality of this small watershed.

Some areas have recovered from historic land uses but impacts from urbanization and invasive non-native species are continuing threats to ecological integrity that must be addressed. Opportunities still exist to protect the remaining wetlands and riparian habitats, to restore ecological function, and improve water quality and perennial base flows.

Silver City Watershed Keepers Training
Volunteers are trained to monitor environmental conditions and parameters, such as temperature, pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity, educate community members on environmental issues affecting the watershed and present findings from monitoring efforts.

Volunteer Monitoring Events
Monitoring events are held quarterly at three sites along San Vicente Creek for which important data is collected to aid in long-term tracking of environmental quality of the Silver City watershed. Volunteers learn how the quality of surface water is affected by our actions on the land and how we can protect our water resources. Volunteers make visual observations of habitat, land uses, and impacts of storms; measure physical and chemical characteristics of surface water; and assess the abundance and diversity of aquatic insects.

Volunteers monitor for indicators of problems caused by historic mining issues, storm water runoff from town, and land management practices in the upper watershed, all of which are suspected to be impairing environmental quality in the Silver City watershed. The data collected by the volunteers is used to identify problem areas that need further assessment and track long-term trends in the watershed.

Monitoring Data
The Silver City Watershed Keepers use their findings to help educate the local community on water quality issues and to foster awareness and stewardship of our water resources. The data is also shared with the New Mexico Environment Department's Surface Water Quality Bureau to aid in long-term management of this stream.

SCWK Data as of 12-9-2011

Get Involved
The Silver City Watershed Keepers need volunteers for monitoring, fundraising, community outreach and education. If you are interested in becoming part of the effort or for more information, please contact Dan at dan@gilaresources.info or 575-538-8078.

*GRIP would like to thank the Norcross Foundation for awarding GRIP a grant to purchase its own monitoring equipment for the Silver City Watershed Keepers!