Week of June 29^th – July 5^th

Assignment for third session

For your third session this week, you’ll work with your group to come up with some ideas about how the different water quality parameters that we’ve been discussing are related to things like land use, surficial geology, and the physical characteristics of streams. We’ve provided you with a matrix to use for your reference. There are three tables to the matrix, one for land use, one for surficial geology, and one for stream characteristics.  Each one lists the chemical parameters that we currently are able to measure on the left hand side. Across the top are different categories of land use, different types of surficial geology, and different characteristics of streams. The excel file containing the three matrices is attached to this webpage (Parameters Table.xls).

Your task is to begin to figure out how the various chemical parameters are related to changes in land use, surficial geology, and stream characteristics.  One way to approach it would be to ask questions like

• What would I expect to happen to turbidity in an agricultural area (would it increase, decrease, or stay the same?) or in an industrial area?
• How are the chemical parameters related to each other (can you think of ways to classify the different parameters? For example, you could group metals together, or major cations, major anions, etc.)
• For the parameters that are related, would they change in the same way for a specific category of land use? (or surficial geology, or stream characteristics)

You do not need to come up with answers for every combination that is present in the three tables.  One way to approach it would be to focus on the water quality parameters that you did your presentations on at the beginning of the summer.

The goal of this task is to think about how all these things we’ve been learning about are related, and to start to come up with some research questions that you’ll spend the rest of the summer working to answer.  While there are a lot of water quality parameters that you can measure, making any measurement requires time and effort, so you want to have some solid reasons for why you want to measure a particular parameter.   (For example – you have a site in a predominantly rural area. What would be some of the water quality parameters that you want to measure there? Why do you want to measure them? What will the measurements tell you? How will the measurements help you to answer your research questions?  What parameters would not be particularly useful to you as you answer your research questions?)

Your group will work on its own for your third session this week.  You’ll continue to work on the same project, but with faculty, during your first session next week (FOS: Monday July 6^th from 9 am – 12 noon; UTC: Monday July 6^th from 5 pm– 8 pm).  Some resources are available in the Muddy Waters file drawer in S-130.  If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask!