ALLARM: Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (Dickinson College)

A long-running community science center that helps watershed groups design credible monitoring programs and then actually use the data for protection and restoration.

ALLARM has been working with Pennsylvania community groups since 1986 and is one of the most experienced community science operations in the mid-Atlantic. The center engages communities to use science as a tool to investigate the health of their streams and to put the resulting data to work in aquatic protection and restoration. Support typically covers study design, parameter selection, quality assurance and quality control protocols, equipment and supplies, volunteer training, data interpretation, and help translating results into something a municipality or agency will act on. ALLARM has supported shale gas monitoring, stream health assessment, and macroinvertebrate and chemical monitoring programs across Pennsylvania, and works with groups in neighboring states as well. For a watershed association that wants monitoring data to hold up in a permit comment or a 303(d) listing conversation rather than sit in a spreadsheet, this is the kind of methodological partner that makes the difference. ALLARM is referenced by POWR as a recommended technical resource for Pennsylvania watershed organizations.