Riparian Habitat Assessment

Riparian Habitat Written summary

Riparian Summary:

Overall the stream did fairly well, it scored almost entirely in the optimal and suboptimal sections with only two sections landing in the marginal category. In general, the river did better in sections about the water and stream bed and did worse in the sections about the banking and immediate riparian zone. Overall the stream scored 153 out of 200 possible points which I am pretty happy with 

Sunday 07-21-24 Day 1

Today was the first day of testing my stream. to start the day I tested the stream conductivity and Ph levels; the Conductivity tester provided was super easy to use and made gathering all of the data easy. When I started testing the pH of the river I somehow didn't learn from the same mistake I made while at the Sharon workshop and while holding both sides of the pH strip I accidentally tore it along the middle. and was unable to get a good photo of it. 

This was the first time I had been down to this stream since before the flooding last year, and the stream had changed so much. Now, there are two clear 'channels' through which the water is flowing. the other thing I noticed while I was there was that there were still a lot of lodged sticks and branched in some corners and sections of the banking from last year's flooding. 

After I was finished running all of my tests I started walking down the river back to my house, where I noticed that further downstream the bottom of the river was filled with this green algae stuff that hadn't been there in years past, there was a good 30-foot section that I noticed where the algae were everywhere.

Below are two sketches i made while down at the stream, neither of them are very good but they get some of the point across

E-Coli in the stream:

In addition to the other assessments I did today I also started a an E-Coli test.

after 48 hours of my stream sample incubating with the E-Coli  the gel developed only three spots, when you multiply that number by ten because we diluted te water sample by ten you get 30 total E-Coli growths. This is a very good result because I was assuming that there would be much more E-Coli in the water.