Developed Landscapes and Water Specific Conductance

Now that we are up and running, we can look across our many sites for relationships between watershed attributes and specific conductance (SC). Here, we have calculated the median SC for ~60 sites in our network during the April 1 to June 30, 2013 period, and relate them to watershed forest cover, developed land, and road density. These results are similar to other studies from the region (Daley et al., 2009, Trowbridge et al., 2010, Kelting et al., 2012) which have shown how roads and parking lots drive water SC. The tightness of this relationship should allow us to predict, at broad scales, the impact of watershed development on water salinization and its consequences.

 

Thank you to our partners and staff for building such a great data set that is allowing us to understand water quality like this.

Hydrologic Resilience of Temperate Forests

Please see this writeup in our sister blog about my time in Japan: http://ecosystemsandsociety.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-hydrologic-resilience-of-temperate.html

Comparing such distant landscapes to ours allows for a new perspective on how to best manage our forests and water.

“Splash into Science” was exactly what students did during their Kids On Campus program in Keene two weeks ago. Steve Hale and I were fortunate enough to facilitate 11 middle school students during the week long session based on the LoVoTECS network data. Students learned how to define a watershed and several ways to assess water quality. Campers battled mosquitoes and lugged sledge hammers, waders, specific conductance meters, PVC housing, rebar and other equipment out to our site on the Ashuelot River to deploy a set of HOBO data loggers. Like the LoVoTECS network, sensors we set to collect temperature, electric conductivity (EC) and water pressure measurements at 3 minute increments. Macroinvertebrates were also collected in buckets and brought back to the classroom for classification. The faces of damselfly larva shocked students at first glance under the dissecting microscopes. The data from macroinvertebrate inventory was combined with the sensor data in order to draw a general conclusion of the Ashuelot’s quality of water. To the students’ surprise, EC levels were hundreds of mircosiemens lower than their predictions. In order to solidify the concept of how humans influence water quality within watersheds, students participated in a water pollution and land cover graphing activity with Skittles as well as Watershed Bingo. My favorite activity of the week was a concept analysis of the term “watershed.” On the first day of camp, prior to any ground-laying conversations, students were asked to draw a watershed. A majority of them drew an image of a shed with some sort of pipe system inside. On the last day of camp, students were asked to draw a watershed again. This time, their drawings included rivers, tributaries, and mountains along the perimeter, farms, factories, roads and bridges. It was clear that all students had a solid understanding of how to define the term. The students showed off their new vocabulary and summarized their findings by creating posters for a poster session for their parents and guardians. It was really neat to see the students articulate what they had learned during the week. We are working on packaging this week-long curriculum so it may be used in future camps or classroom settings.

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).

LoVoTECS in the news

On May 14th, 2013, all of our LovoTECS hosts were participating in the first of three statewide, "snapshot" sampling events. Candace Dolan, LoVoTECS host from Great Bay Community College and the Hodgson Brook Restoration Project was also collecting samples at her sites but she wasn't alone. She was accompanied by three GBCC students and Alicia de los Reyes, a reporter for The Wire-Portsmouth NH. The WireNH© is a free, weekly community paper. Below is a link to the article which mentions LoVoTECS among other Citizen Science driven programs. It can also be found through the NH EPSCoR facebook page.

The WireNH.com
http://www.wirenh.com/news-mainmenu-4/11-news-general/6377-citizen-scientists.html

NH EPSCoR Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/pages/NH-EPSCoR/358956774154659

If you're up to something newsworthy or are planning an appearance as a local celebrity, let us know. We're happy to contribute to the article and to help spread the word.

Citizen Science

The citizen science model of collecting data, like we are employing with LoVoTECS, is growing in popularity. A large group with a solid organizational structure, organizers, and motivated partners can gather more information efficiently together than a small group of experts can. More scientists are recognizing this and building novel projects that answer important scientific questions. Here are links to some other examples and stories about citizen science. I hope you enjoy.

A writeup about a Hudson River group here.
A list of large-scale citizen science projects here.
A highly successful bird research group from Cornell here.

I will be speaking at the Japanese Geoscience Union about the LoVoTECS project on May 20th, focusing on the citizen science aspect for building our extensive hydrologic database. The session is on the new era of 'big data' - I hope to share our experiences collecting extensive data with a large group of partners. Stay tuned...

An Amazing Opportunity to Exchange Ideas

Cypress Trees
University of Tokyo Chiba Experimental Forest

Thanks to the Center for the Environment at PSU, I had the opportunity to travel to Tokyo to work with Mark on my thesis in January. Mark is there on a Fulbright Fellowship until July. While I was there, I gave a presentation on the LoVoTECS network. Citizen Science is a new concept of which many of the students and professors were not familiar. They had many questions about how the networked functioned and were "envious" about how much data we are able to collect through our network. So, I wanted to extend my gratitude in participating in such a novel study! Here are just a few of the highlight pictures!

Wonderfully fresh and adventurous Sushi!

 

Undergrad, Graduate, PhD and Post Doc Students
They were extremely welcoming, gracious and entertaining!