Students participate in World Water Monitoring Day

Mr. Steigerwalt and four Missouri students spent a week in Maryland to represent Missouri at the Youth Watershed Summit. The summit was held Oct. 18 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. The America’s Clean Water Foundation (ACWF), a national and international forum for citizen outreach, youth education, and technical program exchanges, sponsors the program. The goal is to collect data on water quality world wide to see out the health of the world’s water supply.

Twenty-four students, including stream team members, from Mr. Steigerwalt’s Physical Science class monitored water quality at the Grand River site near Jameson on Oct. 16. The students ran chemical tests including air temperature, water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, nitrate, conductivity, ammonia, phosphate, hardness, alkalinity, and turbidity. The students also tested the water’s health by netting and analyzing the macroinvertebrate populations in the riffle area at the site. The students also picked up trash at the test site area and at Wabash access near Gallatin.

After collecting the water quality data from the Grand Mr. Steigerwalt sent in a Stream Team Report to Department of Natural Resources’ water monitoring division and entered the data on the International Water Association (IWA) Internet site. World Water Monitoring Day hopes to draw attention to the issues that affect watersheds throughout the world. This annual event and the data collected will help us understand more about the quality of water throughout the world.

Time has proven that changes in the social practices of every human connected to the watershed are critical to the successful protection and preservation of our global supply of fresh water. World Water Monitoring Day provides an opportunity to positively impact the health of our waters.