An Exciting Year for the CMC!

Despite ongoing challenges in 2021 with COVID and gathering/training restrictions the CMC continues to forge ahead! We had a very exciting year and are happy to share some of the highlights:

1. The CMC team provided over 70 trainings sessions in 2021 – including study design workshops, water quality and benthic macroinvertebrate trainings, Data Explorer trainings, and data interpretation workshops.
2. We have approximately 100 groups actively uploading data to the Data Explorer Annually and over 500,000 total data points in the Data Explorer publicly available to view and download on the homepage.
3. The CMC team was awarded and kicked off the second Cooperative Agreement with the Chesapeake Bay Program, continuing the work of the CMC to 2027.
4. The CMC was recognized internationally as a UNESCO Green Citizens project.
5. The CMC team was able to sneak in a few in-person gatherings throughout the year testing out new monitoring methods and hosting a team meeting as we kicked off the new grant cycle.
6. The CMC team participated in and presented at various conferences: the National Monitoring Conference, CitSci Association, Virginia Water Monitoring Council, as well as other regional and local conferences.
7. The CMC team built exciting new partnerships with the Chesapeake Bay Trust and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to explore monitoring activities to fill in gaps in the Chessie BIBI and build a community-based monitoring protocol to track restoration practices.

We are excited to continue our work into 2022 and hope to see everyone throughout the year. Cheers to another great monitoring year!