Thank you for participating at the 2024 CWMN Results Session!

On Tuesday, July 9th the RDN’s Drinking Water and Watershed Protection (DWWP) service hosted our annual Community Watershed Monitoring Network (CWMN) Results Session. The session was held at Nanoose Place Community Centre, with approximately 45 participants in attendance. Participants included: volunteer stewardship organizations, representatives from BC Ministry of Environmental and Climate Change Strategy and Ministry of Water Lands and Resource Stewardship, Islands Trust, Island Health, other RDN departments, and participants in DWWP’s volunteer observation well program.

At this years’ session, we invited guest speakers from the Province who spoke on benthic invertebrate monitoring and water quality monitoring in stormwater management. We also hosted a presentation from BC Conversation Foundation on a tire wear toxin monitoring program working to track levels of 6PPD-Q, a compound responsible for ‘urban runoff mortality syndrome’ to coho salmon in streams across eastern Vancouver Island.

A core component of this session was to present data results from the 2023 sampling year and prepare stewardship groups for water quality sampling in the 2024 season.

We also introduced our CWMN Strategic Planning initiative and provided an opportunity for participants to provide feedback on the initial proposal for the planning; the feedback that we received will inform future engagement sessions to collaboratively develop and implement a 5-year CWMN Strategic Plan that builds on objectives within the 2020 10-Year DWWP Action Plan to integrate various types of watershed data collection across the region to support stewardship, outreach, and policy.

The Strategic Planning initiative is being proposed for 2025 and will produce an implementable plan that outlines priorities for monitoring on each system that has community stewardship support. Currently, the CWMN focuses on surface water quality monitoring, but it has been identified that integrating more diverse monitoring objectives will ensure that the DWWP is supporting stewardship groups in their key objectives while ensuring that the monitoring that is occurring is addressing identified gaps that will inform longer-term planning and policy advocacy for stream protection, restoration, and enhancement.

Engagement with monitoring partners will happen at several stages during the strategic planning process, with each engagement building on learnings and shared priorities from previous sessions, established relationships with partners, and through referencing the multi-year data and knowledge established on stream systems.

At this stage, the DWWP team is preparing for the Strategic Plan slotted to take place over the course of the 2025 calendar year. During Strategic Planning, regular stream water quality monitoring may be paused to focus on engagement with community stewardship groups and volunteers.

Thank you to all who attended and participated in discussion on the proposed CWMN Strategic Planning initiative!

If you were unable to attend or have further feedback you'd like to share with us at this initial stage, we welcome you provide your input here.