Mary Holleback is the Naturalist and Citizen Science Manager at Riveredge Nature Center. In fall of 2025, Mary reached a 20-Year Monitoring Milestone with the WAV program for her dedication to monitoring her local streams and rivers. From collecting baseline data to teaching the new generation of water stewards, Mary’s professional commitment to our shared waters runs deep.
Continue reading for a post written by Mary about her monitoring work the past 20 years.
Mary and two volunteers search for macroinvertebrates in a stream.
By Mary Holleback
A river has run through my life since childhood. As a youngster, I enjoyed skating on and catching crayfish in the Menomonee River just down the block from my house. During a college ecology course, I became hooked on studying aquatic invertebrates while on an excursion on Lake Michigan on UW–Milwaukee’s research vessel, the Neeskay.
Nine private and public area organizations in the Milwaukee River Basin Priority Watershed Partnership created the Testing the Waters (TTW) program in 1989. TTW links high school students to water quality monitoring through technology. Early in my career as an educator and naturalist at Riveredge Nature Center, I inherited the role of TTW projector coordinator in 1997. To date, over 47,000 students from 55 high schools in 7 counties in the Milwaukee River watershed have participated in TTW.
In the late 1990’s, we joined forces with the Land Conservation Departments in Ozaukee and Washington counties to become water education resource centers. As such, we trained adult volunteers to become water quality monitors through the Adopt-a-Waterway Program. We also loaned out monitoring equipment, provided educational materials, and held workshops on managing run-off, septic systems, drinking water, and other topics.
Adopt-a-Waterway was a forerunner of Water Action Volunteers (WAV) in Wisconsin. From 2006 to present I’ve collected data in five locations on the Milwaukee River and trained monitors in conjunction with Milwaukee Riverkeeper for WAV every year.
A change in laws protecting temporary wetlands prompted us to create the Riveredge Ephemeral Ponds Project (REPP) in 2006. For three years, our volunteers monitored a dozen ephemeral ponds at the nature center and on surrounding properties. I became the coordinator of the Wisconsin Ephemeral Ponds Project (WEPP) from 2010–2013. It was created by the DNR’s Natural Heritage Inventory, the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, and Riveredge, and was modeled after REPP. Volunteers from Milwaukee County Parks, Schlitz Audubon and Wehr Nature Centers, the Bureau of Land Management, and other organizations helped survey and monitored ephemeral ponds all over Southeast Wisconsin to document changes in them as the result of new land use practices.
I became the onsite coordinator for the Lake Sturgeon Rehabilitation Project the same year. The goal of the project is to re-establish a self-sustaining population of lake sturgeon in the Milwaukee River, where they have been absent for over 100 years. In partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources we have released over 22,000 lake sturgeon into the watershed over the past 20 years. An additional 1,000+ fingerlings will be released from the facility each year for the next five years. Some of the sturgeon from 2007–2019 have recently been detected returning to the river.
Prior to my employment at Riveredge, I was a middle school teacher in Hartford, WI. I hold a BA in conservation biology and a MS in curriculum and instruction from the UW–Milwaukee.
