PROGRAMS
Water Quality Monitoring
Interested in learning about the ways urban development impacts our waterways?
Watersheds of South Pittsburgh is implementing a water quality monitoring program in 2025. Check back here for more information, or fill out this survey to tell us your interest!
A watershed can be as small as your backyard, or cover millions of square miles. Saw Mill Run Watershed spreads across 19.5 square miles, while Streets Run Watershed is slightly smaller at 10 square miles. You can learn more about the Saw Mill Run Watershed in the Integrated Watershed Management Plan or Master Site Development Plan!
When it rains, stormwater moves across the land picking up pollutants. Fertilizers, sediment, chemicals from roadways and vehicles, and even littered waste is washed into our waterways. Think about what is found in our urban community, and what happens when it rains.
By monitoring the conditions within a stream, we can better advocate for changes within the watershed, and more easily celebrate our successes.
Watershed: An area of land where water collects and flows into the same body of water.
As water moves through the watershed, it accumulates pollution.
Can you spot any signs of urban pollution in this photo of Streets Run?Chemical Monitoring
Not all pollution is visible…Litter is not the only pollution plaguing our stormwater and streams.
Excess nutrients, introduced by excess and improper fertilizer application, are invisible to the naked eye. In winter, road salt is applied before every storm to prevent ice from forming. When the snow melts, it carries that salt into our waterways. The rest of the year, improper salt storage facilities run the risk of allowing salt to enter the watershed during rainstorms. In our area, heavy metals are leeched out of the ground by water, leaking out into the environment from abandoned mines.
Using an array of chemical tests and scientific instruments, we can take measure water quality parameters to inform us on the health of the waterway.
Biological Monitoring
When assessing a stream, we ask questions like: Is the streambank showing signs of erosion? Is the vegetation a diverse array of native plants, or mostly invasive non-natives? What does the streambed look like: is it sandy sediment, large river rock, something in-between?
We also look beneath the surface: What fish are living within the stream? How diverse is the population of Benthic Macroinvertebrates?
Healthy Streams are Diverse Streams
A healthy stream will have a diverse array of plants and animals, spread across different habitat types. By observing and cataloging the environment, we can make an assessment on the health of the stream.
Check out this StoryMap by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to learn more about how Benthic Macroinvertebrates can inform us about the health of a stream.
What can you do?
If you are interested in learning about Saw Mill Run or Streets Run Watershed, join Watersheds of South Pittsburgh on one of our stream clean-ups, or sign up for the Monitoring Committee.
A stream clean-up allows you to give back to the community by helping to remove litter from our waterways, and is a great opportunity to see the condition of a stream up-close!
Our monitoring committee will be ramping up activity in the 2025-2026 season, so there will be many chances to join us!