Friends of Casco Bay is looking for a few good volunteers who don’t mind getting their hands wet to join other “citizen scientists” monitoring water quality at 40 sites around the rim of Casco Bay.

Participants will learn to test for dissolved oxygen, a measure of how much oxygen is available to marine life; as well as water temperature, salinity, water clarity and pH.

More than 650 volunteer water quality monitors have been trained over the past 21 years to help Friends of Casco Bay collect data on Casco Bay.

“These citizen scientists are a critical part of our research staff,” said Peter Milholland, a citizen stewards coordinator for Friends of Casco Bay. “Without our volunteers, we could never have achieved the level of knowledge about Casco Bay that we have today.”

Volunteers work in teams at 7 a.m. and at 3 p.m. on 10 selected Saturdays from April through October.

Volunteers must be 16 or older, though parents and children may work together.

Training for new water quality monitors is set for Saturday, April 13. A five-hour training session with a hands-on introduction to EPA-certified sampling methods will be held at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Find out more at http://cascobay.org/water-quality-monitoring or contact Milholland via email at pmilholland@cascobay.org or by calling 799-8574.