I’ve spent my career in rivers, lakes, and watershed education, and I am still a little shocked by how foreign the idea of a watershed is to most people. The atlases are my way of putting the data, and the people who collect it, in front of the community in a form it can actually use.
My wife asked four questions in a row. By the fourth one it was too late. This is the origin story we presented to the Rotary Club of Carson City after they funded the equipment — cartoons and all.
The equipment was gone before a single record came off it. What replaced it is a better program — and a more honest picture of how monitoring actually works.