Probmon

I think I’ve mentioned Probmon a few times on this blog without ever really explaining what it is.  You know that I work at DEQ and spend most of my time out in the field.  I’ve talked about bio-monitoring (biomon) before and Probmon is not much different.  The name stands for probabalistic monitoring and it means that the stations we monitor are selected at random.  It’s led by the Biologists and is by far my favorite program.  Basically we are given a list of geographical coordinates that we navigate to using a GPS.  Once we arrive, one of the biologists goes off to do a benthic sample like I described earlier.  The main difference in Probmon and biomon is that with Probmon our bug sample is followed up with an intensive physical survey of the stream.  We measure the stream width five time and then multiply that average by forty.  That number serves as our survey length.  Next we divide that length into ten equal sections.  Then we move from the farthest downstream section, upstream.  At each station we measure stream width, near-flood width, bank height, along with depth and substrate size at five equal points across the stream.  Then we measure the deepest point at ten equal spots from one section to the next.  We keep track of all the large pieces of wood that we see along the way too.  It may not sound like much, but walking that length of stream is often slow going.  It’s definitely a tough day in the field, but I think it’s the best work that we do.