Volunteers looking for 'bugs' ended up solving a public health threat

On a February morning in Leesburg, Virginia, the water temperature in Tuscarora Creek hovered around freezing. Nevertheless, several volunteers assembled along its banks, next to a soon-to-become a county park, determined to plunge their hands repeatedly into the icy stream and scoop up water samples for the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy (LWC). 

Leading the group was Amy Ulland, board president of the LWC and coordinator of the nonprofit’s Stream Monitoring Program. In recent years, the group’s monitoring efforts have greatly expanded, uncovering hot spots for pollution and prompting action, including recent upgrades to a nearby wastewater treatment plant. 

But the program has humble roots, starting out with a few passionate volunteers looking for bugs in the water. 

In 2019, LWC asked its volunteers if anyone was interested in conducting monitoring surveys to look for benthic macroinvertebrates—the small insect larvae and other animals that serve as indicators of stream health. Ulland was one of the interested volunteers, and eventually became a certified stream monitor.

“We did [a benthic survey] in my dad's backyard,” Ulland said. “But as I started doing the program, I was like, ‘I think we should think about this more strategically.’”

A pollution mystery

As coordinator, Ulland expanded LWC’s monitoring sites and selected them to achieve certain goals, gathering benthic macroinvertebrate data upstream and downstream of certain points of interest. 

Two sites along a tributary called Limestone Branch were chosen to give LWC a baseline measurement upstream and downstream from LWC’s 89-acre JK Black Oak Wildlife Sanctuary, near a community called Lucketts. The group just wanted to track any changes caused by some invasive plant removal ahead of a wetland restoration project at the sanctuary. But they were surprised to find a sharp difference between the upstream monitoring site and the downstream one. Something was happening in the quarter mile of stream between them that was causing problems for life in the water.

“It was terrible, the only things in there were, like, worms and leeches,” Ulland said. “So, I went out with a wildlife sanctuary manager, and we just started walking.”

The simple but effective method of having eyes—and noses—on the ground led them to discover that a wastewater treatment plant for Lucketts residents seemed to be discharging untreated sewage into the stream. They brought in staff from Friends of the Shenandoah River to conduct testing for harmful E. coli bacteria.

“And it was off the chart,” Ulland said.

The threat to public health was immediately apparent, especially given that Lucketts gets its drinking water from groundwater wells sunk into a karst aquifer fed directly by the stream.

“The water doesn't get cleaned as it sinks through [the limestone],” Ulland said. “There can be big areas where it just directly goes into the groundwater, so the quality of the groundwater is related to the quality of the surface water.”

The discovery led to a $41,000 grant that LWC received from the Tides Foundation, following a recommendation from the Google Data Centers Grants Fund, to secure clean drinking water for Lucketts. LWC increased its monitoring and held an outreach meeting at the Lucketts Community Center to raise awareness of the potential threat. Lucketts began its own investigation, leading to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determining that the faulty plant must be replaced.

Thankfully, water testing showed that drinking water in Lucketts was not being contaminated. However, LWC identified 17 families that still held a perception that the water was unsafe, and each was spending up to $3,600 per year on bottled water. So LWC paid for water descalers and high-quality countertop water filtration systems to be installed in each home.

“The joke in the communities was that Costco is going to go out of business because they weren't going to be buying water there anymore,” Ulland said. “We just got a grant to give them more carbon [water] filters when they run out.”

Getting a clearer picture of health

Among LWC’s other monitoring sites are two on Town Branch, a tributary that flows into Tuscarora Creek.

“And those [Town Branch] sites just had really bad or questionable benthic scores,” Ulland said.

This prompted Ulland, like she did in Lucketts, to again ask what was behind the poor health of the freshwater ecosystem.

“The bugs, they can allude to certain things, but they can't really tell us why,” Ulland said. “And so then I became aware of the RiverTrends program.”

In 2023, Ulland and LWC volunteers received training and chemical monitoring tool kits from another nonprofit, the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, as part of its RiverTrends program, which equips volunteers across Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

LWC began measuring several culprits—bacteria, water temperature, water clarity, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity, nitrate, phosphate and salinity. They send the data to the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative’s publicly accessible Chesapeake Data Explorer. From there it goes to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and then on to the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Armed with a year of data, Ulland said the plan is to work with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science to create a watershed report card “to help us analyze the data and understand it and hopefully pinpoint some of the major stressors.”

“And then in that report, we hope to share information about what individuals can do, what kind of actions can they take,” Ulland said.

The data collected so far, including on that February morning, already hinted at one of the issues—high salinity caused by excess road salt reaching waterways. Ulland and the other volunteers monitor about 70 sites at least twice a year as part of Salt Watch, in partnership with the Izaak Walton League of America. Last year, LWC volunteers helped sweep up 200 pounds of excess salt, and they also reported uncovered salt piles in order to get them properly covered. This year, once again, they have documented extremely high salinity in some of their water samples.

“And that's really opened our eyes, especially this winter—we have more volunteers than ever,” Ulland said. “The kind of data that is coming in is shocking.”