Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Water Quality 11/6/2012

Today we went out to do water quality at the small bridge site. The water is SO COLD now (hooray for the coming winter?). We also got to see our snake friend hanging out on a rock. The results of the tests were pretty normal and consistent with the results we usually get, except for turbidity! Usually, we only have to add one squirt of the turbidity reagent for a reading of 5 JTU, but we got a reading of 15 JTU this day! This is kind of exciting for me because I had expected the turbidity to be high due to the nearby construction, but all of our water quality tests expressed low turbidity. However, it is never good that a river is more turbid...turbidity is bad. This might mean that I will have to revise the conclusion I came to for my EE, if the results continue to show a higher turbidity. Hopefully we get to visit the beach site this week to see if the turbidity is higher at that site as well.

Monday, November 5, 2012

Lexus Eco Air and Climate Challenge

Now that we sent in our project for the land and water challenge, it's time to plan for the air and climate challenge!
We have decided to focus our efforts on reforestation and saving the long leaf pines. We also want to integrate this project with the website from the land and water challenge.
Other possibilities include creating a recycling program for the school, reducing the waste created by the lunchroom, evaluating the effect of iPads on paper use at the school, and tree-planting events for the community and the local schools we are already working with.

Week 10/22-11/2

These two weeks have been filled with preparation for our project that we submitted to the Lexus Eco Land and Water Challenge. We were able to actually visit Mr.Abernathy two days last week to talk to a total of 100 students. We did two activities with the kids; a simulation of how we catch fish to evaluate biodiversity in the river and an explanation of BMIs followed by an interactive evaluation.
Dr.Haddock came to visit as well to talk a little about our findings at the river and he gave me a CD with more resources for my EE.
We made sure we had confirmation emails from all our connections to put on our entry and updated the website.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Week 10/15-19

This week we have made several connections in preparation for the project we must submit for the Lexus Eco Land and Water Challenge. We talked to several teacher in the Hoover City Schools system about incorporating aspects of our trail into their curriculum. We connected to Mr.Abernathy and White about visiting to talk to middle schoolers about environmental issues and the cahaba. We also connected to Mrs.Flynn to take her class out to our trail for one of her projects. We are also planning an event with Home Depot to make bat bird and butterfly houses to set up along the trail.

For my individual project, I have completed my outline for my EE. I found that erosion and sedimentation control practices are actually effective, if correctly implemented. I had actually expected that the practices would not be sufficiently effective. I guess it's a pretty good thing that my expectation was wrong! 😃

Search for Mussles! 10/12

Today we want out to the beach site to look for clams and mussles. We definitely found a ton of clams! Finding the mussels was difficult and we only found one live mussel. Interestingly, the many dead mussels we found were all concentrated in one area along the shore. Our only living mussel just HAD to be named..Bartholomoo. Hopefully he is still living when we return to the site. We also found a huge mussel that was dead. After consulting Dr. Haddock of the Cahaba River Society, we learned it is unlikely to find mussels this large this far up the Cahaba.

Another interesting find is unrelated to our search for mussels. Once we got to the site we saw the largest fish that we had ever seen at that site.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Beach Site 9/20

Today we went out to set up another leaf bag down by the beach site. The water level of the river rose significantly after a couple days of rain. The river had flooded much higher than the water level was currently showing. This flooding made checking on the leaf bags, setting up a leaf bag, and testing water quality much harder. Our previously set up leaf bags were completely submerged underwater, but the rope was still tied around the tree, so it seems the bag was not carried away by the flooding. We did take water quality and tried to set up another leaf bag, but unfortunately, the bag broke when we threw it out into the water. I have included two pictures in this post, one from Monday when it had not rained and from yesterday when the water level was high

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Leaf Bags- September 11

Today we went out to the bridge site to set up 2 leaf bags. We set one up directly upstream of the bridge and another further downstream.
We saw the caterpillar nest again, but it seems there were fewer critters in the nest.