Many water quality parameters can be monitored to help assess the condition of a river, lake or beach area. One that has received increasing attention within the volunteer monitoring community is E. coli bacteria monitoring. Adopt-A-Stream volunteers may wish to consider adding E. coli monitoring to their monitoring tool box because the data generated can help answer one of the most commonly asked questions by the public, "Is this water safe?"

The bacterial data collected by volunteers for a particular waterway has many uses and benefits along with determining if a particular waterway is safe for recreational purposes. These benefits include establishing baseline data, educating citizens, targeted sampling and Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) development and implementation.

The Adopt-A-Stream Bacterial Monitoring protocol has been developed to make it easy to track E. coli, which the US EPA recognizes as good indicator bacteria for assessing risks to human health from potential pathogens. It involves the use of 3M Petrifilm for plating samples and using egg incubators for incubation. Once a sample is run, E. coli levels in your waterbody can be determined by counting the amount of bacteria on the Petrifilm plate.