Jennifer Yeow

The Slocan River Streamkeepers (SRS) was incorporated as a non-profit society in 2005, and Slocan Valley resident Jennifer Yeow was one of the founders. A conservationist at heart, Jennifer served as Vice President of SRS for ten years, and coordinated many projects including water monitoring, fish counts, and school outreach programs.

While now officially retired from her position as microbiologist and Director of Passmore Water Testing Laboratory, she is still active with SRS, engaging children with water education programs. “I’m just having fun, playing with kids and bugs,” she says about her work with the younger generations, who are given the opportunity to conduct water chemistry tests and use a microscope to observe what lives in the water.

SRS is currently updating the water monitoring program in the Slocan Valley in response to local concerns about water availability and quality – especially following the recent forest fires – that will provide residents with on-going data regarding the quality of their drinking water including minerals, turbidity, and bacteria. A local person will be managing this water monitoring program and will be the liaison between water users and the water testing labs.

Data collection on the quality and quantity of water on some creeks in the Valley began soon after Jennifer and her husband moved here in 1990. There was a high degree of interest in determining the potential effects logging might have on the creeks where residents sourced their drinking water, as well as on the watersheds as a whole.

“What we noticed in these early days was that nobody had any data on the flow or quality of the water. So, we got together with a few people and bought a water test kit, which measured alkalinity, acidity, pH, oxygen, and hardness,” Jennifer explains.

The residents then set up fourteen stations around the valley, passing the kit from person to person. Since Jennifer was trained as a microbiologist, she also began testing water samples for coliform bacteria. The water monitoring program evolved over the years and Jennifer’s partner, Tony, learned hydrometrics (measuring streamflow rates) to complement the water quality testing. New creeks were added to the program, while others ended. The hydrometric data is now on the Columbia Basin Water Hub and the report from that early study is on SRS’s website.

While the parameters have now changed, SRS’s current programs aim to monitor the effects of climate change and forest management on aquatic and floodplain ecosystems that provide habitat for many species, including various species at risk, and drinking water and agricultural irrigation to local communities. For example, conductivity measurements proved the link between surface water sources in the forest and drinking water springs, and through residents’ persistence, this resulted in the protection of part of the forest around the creek. Another creek that had been tested for years, Wolverton Creek in Slocan Park, began to show occasional increases in turbidity and fecal coliforms in late summer. This unsafe drinking water was traced to improper ditching of a Forest Service Road, and the forestry company corrected it. The data has also identified rising water temperatures, and SRS have monitored the effect on aquatic ecosystems, specifically rainbow trout and bull trout.

The group has also enhanced habitat for fish in the Slocan River by planning and installing thirteen instream structures, built with logs and rocks, to create homes for fish. This work also enabled SRS to learn more about the ecology of the river. For example, they learned that there had been over eighty side channels originally, which helped disperse water across the floodplain.

“We looked at the possibility of bringing back some of these side channels and their ecological functions in our restoration work,” Jennifer explains. “At resident’s requests, we were invited to plant trees along the banks of the river.”

Gregoire Lamoureux, a co-founder of SRS, spearheaded the riparian and wetland restoration part of the program, including tree cultivation and planting, which continues to this day.

SRS has been instrumental in introducing CABIN (Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network) to the Columbia Basin, which includes the Benthic Invertebrate Monitoring Program in the Slocan Valley. This water monitoring data was particularly important following the fuel spill in Lemon Creek in 2013, when SRS assessed the recovery of the ecosystem by collecting habitat data and invertebrate samples through the CABIN data assessment.

“The CABIN program through Environment Canada’s database, gave us information on how our creeks compared with reference sites. While collecting interesting data, we could see this would be a popular program for students as an opportunity to learn about the ecology of their river while looking at very cool ‘bugs’ under the microscope.” SRS developed an education program that they took into the local schools.

SRS members are glad that the water monitoring is continuing through Living Lakes Canada (who created the Columbia Basin Water Hub) and SRS is continuing their water monitoring in the Slocan Valley with the support of the local community.