When you create your Water Reporter account you're showing a willingness to do the important work of monitoring your water(shed). Some folks join existing organizations and their monitoring efforts while others are mavericks, keeping a look out for and sharing things of interest to them. We welcome you all!

What's cool about Water Reporter is that the platform does not swallow your observations and then ask you to keep going out and to continuing to share posts. Rather, Water Reporter is ripe with various opportunities for all users to continue participating, observing, learning, and sharing experiences.

1. Sharing observational posts.

Observational posts are geo-located photos that have comment and hashtag fields. The posts can be shared directly with participating organizations to start to build digital atlases shedding light on activities and the status of the natural world.

2. Contributing to on-the-fly or station-specific data collection efforts.

Digital data collection forms still rely on coordinates to collect and store data, but they move beyond a simple photo in terms of the type of data being collected. What's more, rather than sorting the collected information into feeds, the data collected via digital samples is stored in data sources that can be shared via embeddable maps.

3. Having conversations via the global feed.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so let it spark a conversation! For every observation that’s shared, any user can engage by commenting and liking that post. Each comment can include photos or text and the original poster will receive an email notification any time someone comments.