People

In the summer of 2025, Sarah Dobbin swam an incredible 50 km along the Ottawa River, creating a new marathon route while simultaneously fundraising for Ottawa Riverkeeper and raising awareness about open water swimming. Read about her experience in her own words in this guest blog!

Following her Current Conversations talk, Honorary Riverkeeper Jill Heinerth shares a behind-the-scenes look at her work exploring underwater caves, and how collaboration and community drive river conservation.

Ottawa Riverkeeper’s road salt monitoring initiative has uncovered alarming levels of chloride in local creeks for the past 4 years. We explore what the program is finding this year, and how we continue to evolve our monitoring to make it faster, easier, and cheaper to keep tabs on our local freshwater ecosystems.

Ottawa Riverkeeper’s education team has been going to schools in Gatineau to teach students about the watershed and the issues it faces, thanks to our funding partners.

New results from our monitoring program paint a grim picture: road salt pollution continues to harm the ecosystems of urban streams and creeks long after the snow has stopped falling and salt is no longer being spread. We must work on reducing the use of this pollutant to safeguard urban waterways.