Stream Tracker: Crowd sourcing and remote sensing to monitor stream flow intermittence

Streams that do not flow continuously in time and space support diverse aquatic life and can be critical contributors to downstream water supply. However, these intermittent streams are rarely monitored and poorly mapped. Stream Tracker is a community powered stream monitoring project that pairs citizen contributed observations of streamflow presence or absence with a network of streamflow sensors and remotely sensed data from satellites to track when and where water is flowing in intermittent stream channels. Citizens can visit sites on roads and trails to track flow and contribute their observations to the project site hosted by CitSci.org. Data can be entered using either a mobile application with offline capabilities or an online data entry portal. The sensor network provides a consistent record of streamflow and flow presence/absence across a range of elevations and drainage areas. Capacitance, resistance, and laser sensors have been deployed to determine the most reliable, low cost sensor that could be mass distributed to track streamflow intermittence over a larger number of sites. Streamflow presence or absence observations from the citizen and sensor networks are then compared to satellite imagery to improve flow detection algorithms using remotely sensed data from Landsat. In the first two months of this project, 1,287 observations have been made at 241 sites by 24 project members across northern and western Colorado.