JACKSON, Miss.—Joy Rhoads has always felt connected to the waterways near where she grew up in Jackson. She learned to water ski on the Ross Barnett Reservoir northeast of the city and camped along the Pearl River watershed’s many creeks and streams. The hours she spent outdoors made her feel responsible for protecting the area’s natural resources—an attitude she also observed in the people around her.
“Conservation was a part of how most people behaved,” Rhoads, a history instructor at Hinds Community College in the Jackson metro area, told the Mississippi Free Press on July 25. “We were the stewards of (the watershed) because we were using it.”
She brings that same mentality to her work at Mississippi Water Stewards, or MSWS, a statewide water monitoring and education program made up of citizen volunteers. Several times a week, she tests the reservoir and nearby Crystal Lake in Flowood for bacteria and other quality metrics, delivering vital information on local waterways that residents cannot find elsewhere.
The Pearl River watershed “defines us,” Rhoads said, noting that its rivers and creeks are just as much a part of the area’s cultural landscape as its geography. “If the quality isn’t what it ought to be for families to enjoy it, we need to know it first and then work to figure out a solution.”
Surveillance of Mississippi’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters is officially the domain of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, which sets health and cleanliness standards for local waterways and enforces them through monitoring. Bodies of water that fail to meet these standards are listed in reports on the MDEQ website.
But the agency lacks the resources to test all state waterways on a regular basis, necessitating additional monitoring at a community level, MSWS representatives told the Mississippi Free Press.
“Our inland waterways don’t have consistent testing at all by any agency,” said Abby Braman, executive director of Pearl Riverkeeper, a Jackson-area nonprofit that helped launch the local MSWS chapter in 2018. “We have literally thousands of miles of waterways in Mississippi and they can’t get to them all.”
MDEQ did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the frequency and scope of its water quality assessments.
To help fill the monitoring void, Braman partnered with an existing water testing program in Alabama to train MSWS’ first class of “citizen scientists.” A year later, Mississippi State University’s Extension Service, the school’s off-campus educational and research arm, approached Braman about taking the program statewide and establishing new chapters along the Gulf Coast and near the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway in eastern Mississippi. MSU Extension funded the expansion and supplied staff members to train new volunteers.
“With Extension, we do outreach and education all across the state, bringing the research out of the university and really applying it in communities,” Beth Baker, an associate professor at MSU Extension who oversees the MSWS program, told the Mississippi Free Press on July 25. “So it really made sense that we transition from doing a lot of our own water monitoring to engaging citizens around the state.”
The program’s expansion came amid ongoing concerns over the release of toxic waste into major Mississippi waterways. From 2018 to 2020, repeated infrastructure failures in Jackson dumped billions of gallons of sewage into the Pearl River, resulting in contact advisories from state authorities. Six years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency placed the city under a federal consent decree for Clean Water Act violations linked to sewage overflows.
To prevent sewage from passing through local waterways unnoticed, MSWS volunteers earn bacteriological monitoring certifications, allowing them to test for E. coli and other contaminants present in human waste. They are also trained in water chemistry monitoring—evaluating temperature, salinity, oxygen levels and other characteristics—and biomonitoring, the process of assessing the kinds of organisms present in a given water body. After getting certified, volunteers conduct regular testing at assigned waterways in their area, contributing to a growing dataset that is updated regularly on an online platform.
By analyzing water samples at the same locations over time, MSWS hopes to amass enough data to deliver an accurate picture of a waterway’s overall health.
“Water quality monitoring can be tricky in that a snapshot or one sample doesn’t really give you that much information,” Baker said. “So the goal is to monitor a site over a long period of time so we have that established baseline information, which can serve as an indicator … for more monitoring if there’s a concern.”
To date, MSWS volunteers have logged more than 2,200 “observations” from water monitoring trips at 114 different sites across the state according to Water Rangers, the online platform that allows the program and similar initiatives to share their data publicly. Observations range from water chemistry metrics to the presence of coliform bacteria and other aquatic organisms. While around 120 Mississippians have completed MSWS’ certification courses, Baker noted that a smaller subset of volunteers handles the bulk of the data collection.
“More than 45 folks have done active monitoring, and many of them have continued for several years,” she said. “So it ends up being quite a powerhouse of monitoring.”
MSWS is poised to grow its footprint thanks to new federal funding. In July, MSU Extension received $100,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency to further expand the program in Mississippi, arming additional communities with tools to better understand local water issues and keep their waterways safe. The funding will also help MSWS address persistent recruitment and promotional challenges that leaders say have limited its potential.
“Scientists often aren’t the best marketers,” Adam Rohnke, an MSU Extension professor who leads a similar volunteer-based conservation program and assists Baker with MSWS, told the Mississippi Free Press on July 25. Until now, the program has largely relied on word of mouth to attract new volunteers, he said.
Rhoads believes greater outreach by MSU Extension and local groups like Pearl Riverkeeper will help grow the ranks of MSWS volunteers. In recent years, she’s taken her students at Hinds Community College to pick up garbage near Ross Barnett Reservoir, hoping to pass on the conservationist values she grew up with.
“It might take a minute, but I think we’ve got the potential for some very responsible and committed volunteers,” she said. “I truly think people want to give back.”
