At most press conferences, it might be a bad thing to hear children playing in the background during speeches—or to have an attendee get showered with dried grass from a bird building its nest overhead.
But the crowd gathered in Meadowbrook Local Park for Nature Forward’s State of the Streams report launch on April 18 had few complaints. In fact, the kids shouting and the birds nesting at the Silver Spring park supported one of the event’s key messages: habitats around streams like Rock Creek, which burbled past nearby, provide crucial services for people and animals alike.
“A lot of times our streams are one of the first things that connect us to nature as kids,” Lydia Lawrence, Nature Forward’s director of conservation, said in an interview. “It’s so important that we care for our streams because that directly affects our health. Whether it’s our kids playing in streams, or us fishing in streams like Rock Creek, or eventually that water going to the river—all of those things affect what is outside and inside our body.”
For the 2024 State of the Streams report, Nature Forward partnered with five smaller organizations to highlight the specific DMV waterways they represent—Accotink Creek, Little Falls Branch, Rock Creek, Seneca Creek and Sligo Creek. All five received “fair” grades.
“Our streams need our help—they may say a fair score, [but] if we chose letter grades, it might not look as good,” Lawrence said in remarks during the event.
The streams were scored using 14 specific indicators that fit under four criteria: water quality, biodiversity and habitat, climate resilience and access to parks. Partner organizations associated with each stream provided many of the measurements, drawing on data from their own citizen science monitoring efforts.
During remarks at the launch event, Sarah Morse, founder of Little Falls Watershed Alliance, said that she was “grateful” for the partnership with Nature Forward because the creation of a detailed report card would be too expensive for her small organization to take on by itself.
“People love our creek. You can’t walk in the park without seeing people there, and the most important question we get, and [the most] frequent question, is, ‘Is it safe? What’s the water like?’” Morse said. “And now we have something to show them to answer that question, and also to give them a baseline and to see where we can improve.”
Morse and other advocates say that, despite the streams’ “fair” scores, more work remains. Challenges include climate change, invasive plant growth and the increase in concrete and asphalt surfaces, which allow warmer, dirtier water to flow into creeks faster after it rains.
The health of streams in our region has a major impact on bigger water bodies, including the Chesapeake Bay and the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers—where much of the D.C. area sources its drinking water.
“People know a lot about the rivers, but the smaller waterways… often get overlooked,” Morse said. “We can’t clean up the Potomac or the Chesapeake Bay without knowing what’s going on upstream. And since we only work on our local creeks, to have a report like this gives us the data that we need to do the type of planning that’s essential to maintaining and improving the waterways.”
This is Nature Forward’s second iteration of the streams report; in 2022, the nonprofit studied Holmes Run, Northwest Branch and Oxon Run. Lawrence said that the group changes the streams being examined in each report because many of the indicators would likely remain similar over the two-year span between studies.
In choosing streams, Lawrence said Nature Forward seeks to make sure D.C., Maryland and Virginia are all represented. The organization also looks for creeks that already have groups dedicated to their protection, which, Lawrence said, allows Nature Forward’s report to amplify the work of smaller partners and direct concerned citizens toward ways to get involved in their community’s creek.
“[The report card] just gives us some better tools, for advocacy reasons—especially with all the data that we’re getting for all different watersheds,” said Landrum Beard, senior community engagement coordinator for Rock Creek Conservancy. “It’s a big tool in our tool belt.”
