The History of VA SOS

Save Our Streams (SOS) is an award-winning program that has educated and motivated citizens to clean-up stream corridors, monitor water quality, and restore degraded stream banks. An Izaak Walton League member started SOS in Maryland in 1969. The program was adopted by several League chapters and grew so successful that the Izaak Walton League decided to take the program nationwide. In the 1970s, the League sponsored the Water Wagon – a large motor home equipped with monitoring gear and environmental education materials that became a traveling lab.  The Water Wagon visited all of the contiguous United States during its two-year tenure, covering 130,000 miles and teaching as many as 2,000 people a day about stream ecology and monitoring.

Although the Water Wagon taught volunteers to conduct chemical and biological stream surveys in the 1970’s, the monitoring methods did not provide high-quality data that could be used by state environmental agencies.  In the mid 1980’s, SOS volunteers began using a new Save Our Streams biological monitoring method, developed by the Izaak Walton League of America’s Save Our Streams staff and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which provided a more accurate picture of stream health. 

The League adapted the protocol to be used throughout the country, and in 1992, the method was adapted for lowlands as well as for rocky-bottomed streams. Although state and local governments lack the number of employees needed to effectively monitor the streams in their states and communities, many agency personnel are concerned about the quality of volunteer-collected data. To address this concern, Izaak Walton League staff worked with the Virginia Water Control Board and the Department of Conservation and Recreation to improve the SOS biological monitoring method. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved a League-written quality control plan in 1990, making it one of the first quality assurance/quality control plans by a citizen-monitoring group to be approved by the agency.

In 2002, scientists Sarah Engel and Reese Voshell of Virginia Teach published an evaluation of the traditional SOS method (the National IWLA method) and developed the Modified Virginia Save Our Streams (VA SOS) method. VASOS is the only region-specific protocol managed through Save Our Streams. The protocol is used for monitoring anywhere in the Chesapeake Watershed, and the data is made available to the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative. VA SOS has been managed by the Izaak Walton League since 1999, and the League handles submission of data to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).

DEQ accepts VA SOS data at level II, meaning that it can be used to identify sites that require further testing; track the progress of restoration projects; and educate the public on water quality impacts. This data can help DEQ target future monitoring efforts.

After the development of the modified method, volunteers used nets with a mesh size of 1/16” until 2020-2021. At that time, DEQ recommended that volunteers switch to nets with a mesh size of 1/32” to more closely align with the data collection protocol used by state biologists. VA SOS now accepts data from 1/32” or 1/50” mesh nets.

Research