Bowie State University joins RiverTrends

The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay has partnered with Bowie State University, Maryland’s oldest historically black college, to create a monitoring program. It will expose students to green career pathways and explore the tie between environmental and public health. Forty-eight students participated in a Bay 101 webinar at the end of September. The webinar introduced them to the Chesapeake Bay watershed and some of the challenges facing the Bay. Then, students participated in a two-part training series, including a virtual introduction to monitoring and an outdoor hands-on training session on campus to practice field collection methods. The program will monitor chemical indicators. Starting in November, students will be monitoring two sites near campus on a monthly basis, contributing to the first citizen monitoring dataset on the Patuxent River in the area.