Elevation and Lotic Electrical Conductance in New Hampshire

It has been a productive couple of days working with middle and high school science teachers. They have been learning about LoVoTECS and thinking about how to incorporate the data into New Hampshire classrooms.

I was inspired by some of the questions being posed by the teachers, so I pulled together a summary of median specific electrical conductance (EC) at a site versus its elevation. The result is interesting, but I am not sure why it exists. Two possibilities that I have been thinking about:

• Groundwater tends to have a higher EC than precipitation, so maybe our lower elevation sites have more groundwater.
• More people tend to live at lower elevations than higher, and people bring higher EC with them (general pollution, especially road salt in NH).