They don't all have a long-term role.
What we found with our E. coli water quality testing in Gatineau was that then the City of Gatineau began doing regular water testing. There was no more need for us to continue that. We continued to upload those values to the Swim Guide, but we found that was the measure of success.
However, with our watershed health assessment and monitoring initiative, the goal is to gain long-term datasets that we can combine with other datasets. Having the more local citizen scientist datasets allows us to see the really nuanced long-term effects. With our riverwatchers, we already have 10 years of data for the water quality they've been monitoring. Ten years is still just a small blip. The more we collect the data, the more we will be learning from it.
We're also finding shorter loops for some of the data. Unfortunately, we are seeing that some of it tells us a story about very quick, local impacts of climate change. The long-term data is important, but there's already so much to learn in analyzing the short-term data as well.