Meet a Monitor: Nishka Shah

Welcome to our new “Meet a Monitor” blog series , where we’ll spotlight some of our amazing Save Our Streams monitors. If you’d like to nominate yourself or another monitor to be featured, email sos@iwla.org.

Nishka Shah is a certified Virginia Save Our Streams monitor and a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, VA. She first became interested in stream health in middle school, after learning about how human sources of pollution affect streams. Then, on a field trip in high school, she learned how scientists monitor water quality in streams and wanted to get involved. Online research led her to the Izaak Walton League and Virginia Save Our Streams, and she began to attend monitoring events with the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District. She became an official certified monitor in the summer of 2024.

While monitoring, Nishka enjoys meeting others who share her passion for restoring the environment and saving local streams. “While my interest in saving streams started out as a smaller issue of trying to reduce pollution and help the organisms who live in or rely on those streams, it has become so much more than that,” she shared. “The streams in northern Virginia feed into the Chesapeake Bay, so their health is correlated to the health of the Chesapeake Bay, which several habitats rely on for survival. Solving this issue has become one of my greatest passions, and an incredibly fulfilling goal to work towards.”

As a member of the Virginia Association of Soil & Water Conservation Districts’ Youth Conservation Leadership Institute the past two years, Nishka developed an advocacy plan to reduce fertilizer and fecal pollution in northern Virginia streams and presented about the issue at multiple community and school events. Her current project is studying how differences in microbial communities in two streams affect or are affected by macroinvertebrate species composition and diversity. This project is in collaboration with scientists from Virginia Tech and the United States Geological Survey, who are looking at introducing mussels into these two streams.

Thank you, Nishka, for volunteering with Save Our Streams and for the important work you are doing to protect streams in your community! We are excited to see where your passion leads you!

Want to become a Save Our Streams monitor, investigate the health of your local waterways, and advocate for their protection? Get started online today.

Know a cool story about yourself or another monitor you’d like to share? Email sos@iwla.org to recommend someone for “Meet a Monitor.”

Top photo: Nishka poses at Great Falls National Park in McLean, Virginia.