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MONTANA WATER NEWS will come your way via email every month with fresh news about meetings and water topics we hope are of interest to you. If you do not want to receive this newsletter, please scroll down and follow the directions to unsubscribe. If you are seeing only text in this email, or if it's not easy to read, please make sure your email program is set to view "HTML" messages, or view the newsletter online in the newsletter archives.

At our last Montana Water Center staff meeting, Kevin Kundert, Interactive Training Coordinator, reminded us that our Operator Basics Training Series was the most often asked-for product made available in 2003 through the National Drinking Water Clearinghouse. That made us think that you might want to know more about these innovative, nationally-recognized public water systems training CDs developed right here at the Water Center. To meet your trainers, Flash and Sanitary Sam, and for more information, go to the Training Projects Area of our website. You can order free copies of these CDs at 800-624-8301.

Ask Bill Granath of the University of Montana how he got involved in his five-year study of the ecology of whirling disease in Rock Creek, Montana, and he'll tell you it was a combination of his deep professional interest in parasites, a love of fly fishing, and perfect timing when whirling disease hit hard in Montana's wild trout streams.

Granath received his PhD in Parasitology in 1982 and just happened to focus his doctoral work on a fish parasite, Schistosoma.

When the federal funds became available from the Partnership in 1996 for rapid response solutions to the whirling disease dilemma, the fact that the causative parasite had a two host life cycle had only just been discovered. Granath thought it a critical time to begin a long-term study of a parasite throughout an entire drainage. An uplifting part of this work, he says, was that "local people and other scientists would listen to what I was trying to do and offer great ideas and insights. This was a breakthrough for real decisionmaking. I felt like my research was making a difference."

Indeed it has. He and his team of five graduate students who have assisted and benefited from this research have found that the whirling disease parasite is not uniformly spread in the basin. "Hotspots," where the parasite prevails, are areas deserving of more management focus, like concentrated habitat restoration. Now Granath and his team are busy testing the degree to which watershed management practices like habitat restoration and streamflow variation influence disease severity.

More information on this and other Bill Granath studies can be found at the Montana Water Center's Water Resources Research Program web site.

Last year, the Blue Water Task Force prepared a series of water science articles. So good, in fact, that we decided to highlight some of them here for the next few months.

Here's one entitled "Close Encounters of the Intestinal Kind" by water quality specialist, Michelle White.

So many meetings, so little time. Even so, there are a few that water folks just shouldn't miss! Find more information on these and other upcoming events on the Events Calendar at MONTANA WATER.

2003 Watershed Symposium: Opportunities for Communities and Landscapes, Great Falls, December 8 & 9, 2003 [INFO]