Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring - ALLARM

Founded in 1986, by Dickinson Professor Candie Wilderman, ALLARM’s original mission was to study the effect of acid deposition on Pennsylvania waterways. To that end, volunteer monitors have gathered data on a weekly basis at over 550 sites in 96% of Pennsylvania counties; their work represents over 16,000 person-hours invested. This information, widely recognized as the most comprehensive database on pH and alkalinity of Pennsylvania streams, is used by conservation organizations as well as local and state government for policy development.

In 1996 ALLARM expanded its focus and began to work with locally based groups to develop watershed-based water quality monitoring programs. Our Technical Support Center works cooperatively with volunteer stream monitoring groups across Pennsylvania to identify the watershed issues specific to that community. We provide an integrated series of workshops that guides volunteers through the process of delineating the watershed, collecting existing sources of water quality data, as well as choosing sites and parameters to measure. In addition, we provide comprehensive training in field and laboratory methods for chemical, physical and biological assessment, study design, data interpretation, data utilization, and restoration/mitigation techniques.

In 2009, we were contacted numerous times by Pennsylvania citizens who were interested in determining what role volunteers could play in response to natural gas drilling. The following semester, Science Director Candie Wilderman and Assistant Director Jinnie Monismith developed ALLARM's Shale-gas Monitoring Protocol. In the summer of 2010, ALLARM began traveling throughout Pennsylvania training volunteers how to monitor for flowback contamination in small streams.