Joanie Dubé

The Société d'aménagement de la rivière Madawaska has been around for 25 years. We were created because the Madawaska is the river that goes through Edmundston, and the people were like, ‘Ok yeah, that river is dirty and we can’t swim in it or use it.’ Since then we’ve expanded to all of Northwestern New Brunswick because there are a lot of priorities and there’s not a lot organization. So now we are working on invasive species, endangered species, water quality monitoring, awareness, and we are working a lot with wetlands and all the other rivers.

The water monitoring work we do has really been driven by people’s concerns. We started the monitoring to know, what are the problems? And, what can we do? DataStream will benefit us because we won’t lose the data, and it will benefit other groups because they’ll know what we are doing. If they want to do more work on the Madawaska or somewhere else, they can use these data.