Illinois RiverWatch Hosts Illinois Crayfish Finders Training Session

EAST ALTON – The National Great Rivers Research and Education Center (NGRREC℠) encourages community members to attend an Illinois RiverWatch training session from 7 to 8 p.m. this evening (March 18) to learn about the Illinois Crayfish Finders project.

In partnership with the Illinois Natural History Survey, Illinois RiverWatch is hosting a virtual training session covering collecting crayfish, taking proper pictures for identification, and submitting data to the project. The data will be submitted using a popular community science website, iNaturalist. A recording of the training will be available for those unable to attend the live training.

“Crayfish provide many benefits to freshwater ecosystems such as creating new habitats by building burrows, playing an important role in the food chain by being predators and prey, and breaking down decaying matter, which helps recycle nutrients and improves water quality,” RiverWatch Volunteer Coordinator Hannah Griffis said. “Unfortunately, two invasive species are threatening populations of native crayfish.”

Griffis said the program needs the community’s help to find the crustaceans known as crayfish, crawfish or crawdads. Illinois is home to more than 20 species of crayfish.

The project website has the registration link for the training event and will have the recording posted after the session: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/illinois-crayfish-finders.

For more information, visit www.ngrrec.org/Riverwatch or contact Haake at dhaake@lc.edu  or (618) 468-2784.

Illinois Crayfish Finders

A special two-year project of RiverWatch Participatory Research Opportunities (PRO). RiverWatch Pro community science projects are designed to collect data to meet specific goals. The goals of this project are to observe the distribution of native crayfish and to identify watersheds where invasive crayfish are found.

National Great Rivers Research and Education Center (NGRREC℠)

Founded in 2002 as a collaborative partnership between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lewis and Clark Community College, NGRREC is dedicated to the study of great river systems and the communities that use them. The center aspires to be a leader in scholarly research, education, and outreach related to the interconnectedness of large rivers, their floodplains, watersheds, and their associated communities. To learn more about NGRREC, visit www.ngrrec.org.