Georgia Adopt-a-Stream is the state's official volunteer water quality monitoring program.
It's managed by the environmental protection division. What we do here in Cobb County is
train volunteers. So it could be citizens, could be classroom schools, anybody who wants to become
a volunteer will become trained, certified. We'll teach them how to use the equipment
here. We can loan them the equipment and they'll go out and monitor a stream that they adopt.
And they'll take these measurements and submit data monthly to an online database.
We can take a look at that data and determine if anything is going on with the stream or if
it's normal. And over time we see trends. And if we see something that just doesn't seem right,
we can figure out maybe something's going on and hopefully go out and fix it. In Cobb County,
we have over 3,200 miles of stream and waterway. If you line those up end-to-end they would line
from Atlanta to Los Angeles and part way back. It's pretty impressive how much water we have.
Those 3,200 miles of waterway do end up in our drinking water sources. So protecting
these small streams is really important because this is really our source of water that we have.
A stream is a body of water much like a pond or a river or lake. They can be anywhere from
commercial building sites, private property, even where you work or where you shop there might be
a stream out there that you might not even notice is there. Some of these streams have been over
time driven underground due to development but that doesn't mean that they're still not there.
So whatever you do, where you live or where you work or play, has effects downstream.
So the importance of all these streams and protecting them and when you think about a
watershed and how it's determined by topography and the lay of the land those smaller streams
up in the headwater areas really kind of filter together and trickle down make larger streams
those merge together make larger streams and that ends up being our water source where we
get our drinking water from and also provides an incredible amount of habitat and biodiversity
so when we protect the smaller streams we're really protecting the larger rivers and bodies
of water in our case here in Cobb County you know it's our lake and Chattahoochee River so one of
the things we do is look for macroinvertebrates in the stream and they have different tolerances to
pollution levels and those pollution levels well actually correlate to dissolved oxygen one of the
organisms that we're probably most familiar with might be the dragonfly the streams really are
nurseries for these organisms and dragonflies start their life cycle in the water some of
them can live in the water for up to several to three years when you see a dragonfly you know
that there's probably going to be some healthy water around because you need that to survive
so we have the adopt-a-stream program and anybody can get involved in that it's a great way to learn
your stream you go down once a month and visit and really get connected with that stream site
it's certainly a wonderful thing to get to know a plot of land or a section of water
i like participating in adopt a stream because i just find it
fun and cool what we can find out about the water i think it's important to take care of
our water so we know if it's safe or not and so we have a lot of information on it
here price today is being able to come out here and experience like firsthand
how like the water testing works it's very fun participating in programs like adoption
is good because it helps teach kids responsibility that way when they grow up like they have a better
understanding of what they need to do to help take care of the world so by understanding how
our water works and how it can get polluted and it can be dangerous for us they might be able to help
stop it and be able to pick up trash like the park and stuff so they can help take care of our world
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