Water Quality Monitoring Project

1. Include the title of the project or event and the number of hours you volunteered. Include the name and email of the event organizer who can verify your attendance at the event.

The event I participated in is called Water Quality Monitoring Project. I volunteered for approximately 4 hours from 10am-2pm. The event organizer is Kacie McCarty and you can contact her at kacie.mccarty@email.edcc.edu.

2. What organization sponsored this event or activity and what were the goals of the event?  Describe the goals or purpose in a sentence or two.

Kacie said that Boeing sponsored this event and that they try to go almost every two weeks. The goal of the event is to monitor turbidity, hardness, pH, bacteria, and alkalinity of the water at Japanese Gulch. The different factors of the water can affect the life around the environment. She said at one point there was only two salmon down the stream but now there are about 12. If the water quality is terrible, that number would’ve went down.

3. Briefly (in a sentence or two), summarize your duties at the event and include photo documentation.

Everyone who attended the event was assigned a random duty based off how close you stood next to Kacie. I tried my best to stay in the back, however, I was still given a task. Most of the time I was more of the “dishwasher”. I would take the glasswares and give them a good rinse in the stream. I also happened to be guide other students as they used micro pipets with the incorrect techniques.

4. In at least one paragraph, reflect on (a) how this experience affected you and your thoughts on the role of science in society and the importance of your service to your community and (b) make explicit connections between what you did for this Service Learning activity and the material in this course, including the potential impact on ecology and/or people in our bioregion.  How is ecology interdisciplinary?  This reflective essay should be written in one or more paragraphs (300-word minimum, not including items 1-3).  It should be something that can easily be slightly edited to strengthen a personal statement for an academic program or a job or internship application.

We recently learned in class that everything is interconnected. Today’s service learning experience strengthen my knowledge upon the concept. I learned about the importance of the stream and how it helps everything around it. One example I previously brought up was the salmon. Two salmons were introduced to the, once considered inhabitable, stream and were able to reproduce successfully. This was due to our ability to monitor the water quality and adjust any hazardous factors such as turbidity, pH, alkalinity, hardness, and bacterias. David, a student who consistently participates in this event, mentions that the Japanese Gulch is near the Boeing in Everett and the city was worried about the pollution in the area. As we took a hike around the Japanese Gulch trail, the only pollution I’ve really noticed was the amount of dog poop everywhere. The stream happens to also be located about 0.2 miles behind a dog park. If the dog poop was to ever enter the stream, it can alter any factors listed above. This just illustrates how easy it is to alter water quality. Without science, we wouldn’t have been able to test anything. All of our tests required different chemicals, but one that particularly stood out was the bacteria test. Thanks to our numerous labs, I knew how to test to see if bacteria was present.

Water quality is essential to life, it affects our interconnected world. The plants, fungi, animals, and bacteria all depends on it. Our objective was to test the water quality and make sure everything fell within a suitable range. By monitoring the water quality, we were able to help control pollution levels and influence the growth on our ecosystem. Ecology is interdisciplinary because everything we know is connected in some way. For example, if the water quality in the Japanese Gulch was bad, the salmon down the stream wouldn’t be alive. Also, the trees and plants wouldn’t be as healthy or alive forcing all the insects and animals to decline in numbers.

5. Provide at least 4 questions that were raised based on your service learning activity.

Is there another reason why Boeing might sponsor such a small organization?

Will any other species be introduced to the Japanese Gulch?

How much did the water quality testing kit cost?

Why does Kacie decide to test the water in the middle of the stream rather than the beginning or end of the stream?

In the first picture you can see everyone gathered around the water quality testing kit. We were posing for a picture as I yelled, "Act natural!"

Picture 2 shows the area of the stream where we tested our water quality.

Picture 3 shows the half broken bridge we had to cross on our miniature hike to the stream.