Bush Rangers Nora Hughes Water Monitoring Project
For our first activity for Term 1 2020 (which also happened to be the last for the term) the JFSC Bush Ranger cadets have started to look at water quality, focussing on the lake at Nora Hughes Park.
During our first couple of meetings we conducted research and put together a plan for monitoring the water quality in the lake. We had to work out what Mr Cummings meant when he talked about “Water Quality”, what made water good or bad quality, why we should care about water quality, what we should be testing, how we should be testing, where we should be testing, and also what we were going to do with the data we collected. It was tough trying to come up with all the answers so we were very lucky that Mr McLaughlin from the CSIRO came out to help us come up with some answers and to provide us with lots of extra support.
Once we came up with our plan, we then went out to Nora Hughes Park with our water collecting equipment and chemicals to do our tests. Mr McLaughlin helped us work out how to test for certain components in the water like Nitrates, Phosphates, pH and lots of others. It was great to see everyone working hard together to collect as many samples as possible and record all the results. Mr McLaughlin also showed us how to use the CSIRO’s Eye on Water app to take photos of the lake to help scientists with their research.
We did have a few problems collecting water samples and doing the experiments but Mr Cummings and the other teachers asked us to think about what went wrong and we were able to come up with a lot of different ways we could improve our plan. It was a bit like one of our science investigations, where we have to do a method evaluation after an experiment to see how we could do it better next time. I think they tricked us into having fun while doing Science!
When Bush Rangers starts up again later in the year (hopefully!) we will be coming back to our water monitoring project to improve our plans and collect more data. We’re looking forward to seeing what we discover and whether there is anything we could do to help improve the water quality in the lake.
Thanks for reading!
- The Bush Ranger Cadets
