Monitoring water quality is critical to ensuring the health of Ausable streams and lakes. Each year AsRA's staff monitors 30 stream sites and 12 lakes. Two of those lakes, the stunning Cascades Lakes, are a focus of our long-term monitoring efforts.

Talk about getting to know the Ausable River even better than before! AsRA science staff Carrianne and Liz spent the past two weeks climbing up, down, and along riverbank forests surveying the buffer zone between people’s homes and the river or stream bordering their yard. From thick stands of speckled alder-dominated shrub lands and dense hemlock forests, all the way to riverbanks full of towering hardwoods, we've seen a lot of healthy buffers.

The landscape of the Ausable River watershed bears the marks of events that extend far into the Earth's deep past. The rocks, structures, and sediments in the watershed represent distinct occurrences in the natural history of this area. Some of these events occurred over a billion years ago and lasted for hundreds of millions of years. Other events are much more recent and can be seen on much finer time scales. Everything in the natural landscape represents part of that story and owes its present form to one or more of the events that made this place.