Watershed Monitoring For America!

This weekend, I went to Boise to volunteer with the Boise Watershed Watch to get a little more experience with water quality testing before I have to teach 7th graders how to do it with the SEEDS7: Watershed Detectives field trips. I chose a monitoring location at the MK Nature center, so we did most of the tests in a creek flowing into the Boise River. Previously, I had only ever really done water quality tests with a YSI, so I figured it could be beneficial to get more exposure to different tools and methods. The one test I found unique and fairly interesting was the Dissolved Oxygen test. We had to collect a sample of water in a small beaker, take a class pipette of sorts and break the tip off in the beaker. The beaker filled with water and after inverting and waiting two minutes, we compared the color to a DO key. After completing the tests, we did a survey of macro invertebrates, and recorded other life seen in the area. We found a far different scope of inverts there than we did in the pond at Deer Flat the day before, which was interesting. I also found a dead sculpin (the fish) and saw a few kingfishers.

How Neat Is That?!