While we mentioned some of our amazing volunteers and their accomplishments through the past year, we wanted to share some highlights of 2025. SSI saw an increase in total volunteer hours with a total 1,547 in volunteer hours across departments doubling our volunteer hours from 2024. We also welcomed 18 new volunteers to our science community!
The BMI lab had a total of 665 volunteer hours quadrupling our volunteers hours from 2023 where volunteers spent 170 hours in the BMI lab. One of the major impacts to the increase in BMI lab volunteer hours are our high school internships. Thanks to programs like Connecting Point we were able to connect us with three paid interns: Lucas, Quinn, and Alan. Two of our local high schools also require internships as part of their curriculum, Bitney Prep High School and Ghidotti Early College High School, who were able to provide five interns including: Quinn, Lucas, Teyan, Safari, and Johann. These students committed to weekly hours in our BMI lab allowing us to document a huge backlog of BMI specimens. Other BMI lab volunteer shout outs go to our regular volunteers including: Kathy McCreery, Cathy Donnellan, Dan Consoer, and Jayna Frank. We are so lucky to have such a committed group of volunteers in the BMI Lab. Here is a fun video from our intern, Quinn, who has made some truly hilarious BMI videos:
Another major contributor to an increase in volunteer hours for our creek surveys is the Delta Project where staff, volunteers, and interns collecting data from over 20 sites throughout the Sierra Nevada. These surveys often included several days of camping and bush wacking to collect data. The stories from these trips have been wild, more on those in a later post. Our volunteers logged a total of 460 hours for their work on creeks surveys!
As mentioned in our SSI Year in Review, our Water Quality Monitoring volunteers logged 422 hours an increase of over 200 hours from the year before. We want to give a special shout out to all our volunteers, but there are a few who need some special attention:
Most Volunteer Hours: Teran Baker, who volunteered a stunning 72 hours! (read about Teran in her Volunteer Highlight Blog)
Youngest Volunteer & Family of Volunteers: Nick Green and his daughter Evelyn Green, who is learning about water quality and watershed science at 6 years old!
Longest Serving Volunteer: Julie Herrlinger who has volunteered with SSI since 2001! (read about Julie in her Volunteer Highlight Blog)
And finally a huge shoutout to several new Bear River Watershed Volunteers:
- Shannon and Andy Dooley-Miller
- Laura Millar
- Donna Bussinger
- Susan Brandt
We cannot expressed how grateful and amazed we are for all the hard work and commitment to watershed health our community is! We look forward to expanding our volunteer program even more in 2026 with our restoration and outreach programs.
