From the 6:45a pick up, to loading equipment, to the essential coffee stop, to scoping out the monitoring site, to site set up, I finally realized what a beautiful morning it was sitting on a log pulling off my waders. The light pink tinged clouds, the bustle of the Clark Fork, Canada geese flying over caused an emotion to well up inside me: ‘I’m at the river and it’s a good day to be alive.’ This field trip was a little different than the others I’ve done in the past. Because of time restraints, we primarily demo’ed how to run the water quality tests instead of letting the students do them. This way we were able to focus on the main scientific ideas of water quality testing and downplay the step by step instructions of conducting the tests. In addition to dissolved oxygen, we showed students how to test for nitrates and phosphates and more importantly, why we test and what would cause detectable traces of the substances to be there. Eutrophication was one of the main ideas in the lesson. Having done some undergraduate research on aquatic plant cover in a stream recovering from eutrophication, I have a vested interest in the subject. The site I studied during my undergraduate was a spring fed calcium carbonate stream recovering from point source pollution. As a student, eutrophication can be a tricky concept to understand. When students are asked about contributors of dissolved oxygen, plants are a common guess, so it is essential to clarify the overall effects. Aside from the outcome eutrophication has on DO levels, I like to mention the effect it has of lowering aquatic plant diversity. Massive algal blooms set off a competition for sunlight that shut out submergent plants. This was evident in the research I did as watercress (an emergent plant) and filamentous algae dominated the stream before recovery.
WEN volunteer Taylor Wilcox joined us for the second half of the field trip to lead the chem station. As the second group of students filed down to the river, the clouds began to darken and the wind kicked up. Before we could get through our second station, the sky opened up on us with a nice dose of cold rain, when it noticed that we weren’t budging, it changed to graupel-like snow, then gave up and went back to rain. The students maintained a level of enthusiasm, but we were all more than glad to finish and get out of the cold.
Emilie Kohler is an AmeriCorps*VISTA Development Assistant for Watershed Education Network. She has been working with WEN since July 2009.
This is totally cool. How did you get high school students out at to rivers at 8:00 in the morning and in such wild weather?
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