Volunteers Track the Roe Jan’s Health

On Mother’s Day, Wendy Fieser and her husband, John, set out around 9:30 a.m. to collect water samples from the Roeliff Jansen Kill, one of the largest tributaries of the Hudson River.

The Fiesers, who have lived in Germantown for about 40 years, are among a group of residents working to protect the Roe Jan while it is still relatively healthy. Since 2016, volunteers with the Roe Jan Watershed Community, a nonprofit organization, have collected samples from about 15 sites across the 230-square-mile watershed from May through October.

The work is routine by design. By gathering the same kinds of data year after year, the group is creating a record that could help the community spot changes tied to climate change, development, stormwater runoff and septic systems before they become harder to address.

The next sampling date is June 14 and will include sites in Hillsdale, Clermont, Ancram, Copake, Gallatin, Livingston and Germantown in Columbia County, and Pine Plains in Dutchess County. The watershed is the ancestral homeland of the Mohican people, Indigenous to this region and now known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, based in Wisconsin.

Kaare Christian, who lives close to a Roe Jan sampling site near Lasher Park, launched the program in 2016 in collaboration with Riverkeeper, another environmental nonprofit. He said the samples have generally shown a promising picture.

“The water quality is pretty good,” Christian said, adding that the shift to organic farming along the streams has reduced pollution. “I just thought that monitoring is a good thing to do, so that you have a baseline, so that people are aware.”

For the Fiesers, sampling day meant covering six sites, from Cheviot Park to the Elizaville bridge. At each stop, John, a retired carpenter, lowered a long-handled dipper into the water. He rinsed it three times to clear residue from the previous site, then filled it and poured the water into a 250-milliliter sampling bottle held by his wife.

When Wendy once forgot to wear gloves, she emptied the bottle and started over.

“You have to wear gloves so the water doesn’t touch your hands and get contaminated,” Wendy said.

The bottles went into an insulated cooler in the trunk of their car, bound for the Bard Community Sciences Lab in Annandale-on-Hudson, where they would be analyzed before the samples had time to change.

At the Sportsmen’s Club stream, where Wendy said one of her sons learned to swim many years ago, she recorded observations like “windy” and “clear water” after using a water quality monitor to take readings. Then the couple hurried back to the car. They still had more sites to reach — and a Mother’s Day brunch in Poughkeepsie.

Wendy, a music teacher who also serves on the town’s Climate Smart Task Force, said the work reflects a broader local attachment to the watershed.

“People in this community are very connected to the land,” she said. “If we saw things dying because of the toxins in the water, it would worry us.”

That kind of vigilance matters, said Desireé Lyle, manager at the Bard Community Sciences Lab. The sampling data can show whether conditions are changing over time, and in which direction.

“With climate change, we should expect biological and chemical changes in our water,” Lyle said. “These data can be a way that we monitor how climate is affecting our waterways.”

Scientific readings are only part of the picture, she said. Everyday observations from residents — changes in smell, color, clarity or sound — can help identify patterns that data alone might not immediately explain.

In Red Hook, part of the Saw Kill watershed, community members flagged changes in smell and appearance that were later connected primarily to an increase in enterococci, a fecal-indicator bacteria.

“If normal, everyday people start to notice changes — what they hear, what they see — those kinds of sensory details are important,” she said. “Once you collect those and start to see patterns, they can be added to the biological and chemical data we’re already monitoring and help illuminate what might be happening.”

According to Riverkeeper data on enterococci, most sites in the Roe Jan watershed met New York state beach water quality standards by the final sampling date in October 2025. But levels spiked at many locations after rainfall earlier in the season — a common result of contaminated stormwater runoff and untreated sewage flowing into waterways.

Enterococci are not considered directly harmful to people, but their presence can indicate that other pathogens or viruses may be in the water, creating risks for swimmers and people who eat fish caught from the waterway, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Roe Jan monitoring program also tracks indicators including temperature, dissolved oxygen and nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen. That record could become especially important if the watershed faces a sudden environmental stress, said Eli Dueker, an associate professor of environmental and urban studies at Bard College who works with community water monitoring projects, including the Roe Jan.

“These are really important data for when true crises do occur,” said Dueker, who also works with community water monitoring projects including the Roe Jan. “The data collection in and of itself — the fact that those data exist, are there to be used and activated when necessary, is a huge deal.”

Jane Meigs, a 26-year resident of Ancram and chair of its Conservation Advisory Council, said the Roe Jan’s health should not be taken for granted.

“It’s a good, relatively healthy river, and there aren’t that many anymore. Water is going to be increasingly scarce in our country. So I think whatever we can do to preserve the river and the ecosystem is very important for long term sustainability.”

Jamie Purinton, a landscape architect and board member of the Roe Jan Watershed Community, said landowners near streams can help by maintaining vegetative buffers, which filter runoff that may contain fertilizer and animal waste before it reaches the water.

“We’re all impacted by each other,” Purinton said. “If you’re downstream from someone, then it matters how they treat the river.”

For Purinton, the sampling program is also a way to make the watershed more visible to the people who live within it.

“It’s interesting to learn the connectivity between places that you drive by, to know how the river connects to the landscape and to get an understanding of where it travels.”

Residents interested in participating in the sampling program can contact Kaare Christian at kaare@roejanwatershed.org.