Water Quality

Created By: James Rothwell

Currently Used By: Emma Shuttleworth, Matt Dennis

Instructions

Part 1 - preamble (usually takes about 30-40 minutes)

Walk the students to the clearing in the woods out the back of the field centre.

Talk them through what influences water quality, why we should care and how we might measure it, using the handout as a guide. I don't usually give the students the handout till later on so they have to think!

Get them to think about what might be influencing water quality in the stream next to them. They usually mention the field centre pretty quickly (cars, sewers, litter, septic tank, etc).

Head to the equipment store and grab the waders, kick nets and buckets.

Walk back to the clearing and get them to think about how you might design an experiment to test if the field centre is influencing the water quality in the river. Key considerations:

• Take samples upstream and downstream of field centre
• Take the same number of samples at each site
• Sustain kicking effort across all samples
• Kick for same amount of time per sample

Part 2 - sampling (usually takes about an hour)

Equipment

Each student should have:

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Staff require:

Keep an eye on the weather and stream level. If there has been a lot of rain the river may be in spate and it will be dangerous to run this project.

Get the kit ready in the equipment store before you find your group.

Handouts

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