Methodology for public monitoring of total coliforms, Escherichia coli and toxicity in waterways by Canadian high school students

Public control and management of the environment and official decisions about environmental issues increasingly require public environmental monitoring by citizens. The aim of public monitoring is not to replace official monitoring. The difference is that official monitoring aims to determine if regulations are being broken, thus relying on accurate measurements obtained by court-acceptable procedures. Public monitoring, on the other hand, aims to determine if a site of concern to local citizens is a source of pollution; this requires the establishment of a pattern of pollution, which can be obtained by a variety of methods, as long as they are scientifically sound and reliable. Once such a pattern is established by the public, the official agencies can determine if regulations are being broken at the site of concern. Accessible methods for public monitoring are validated in this work by comparing the results of monitoring of a group of local urban waterway sites using simplified and inexpensive methods accessible to the public, with the results of monitoring the same sites using more expensive and modern officially accepted methods. The measurements were of total coliforms per 100 ml water sample, percent total coliforms that are Escherichia coli, and toxicity, using D. magna as endpoint. We found that high school students were able, after suitable training, to produce values for the above parameters comparable to those of an expert (G.S.) and to those using more expensive and modern officially accepted methods.