Volunteers are needed to collect water samples from three locations in the Battle Creek watershed for nitrogen analysis.
TRAINING: Volunteers who will meet outside the ACLT office at 9am and get sample bottles and instructions from local researcher Dr. Walter Boynton.
Immediately following this short debrief, pairs of volunteers will head out to pre-assigned locations and collect samples. The samples are brought back to the ACLT office where Walter and others will process them and before being sent to the Chesapeake Biological Lab for analysis.
At least one person on each team will download the free Avenza app to their smartphone to navigate to your assigned sampling points.
PURPOSE: ACLT will be conducting its 2024 water quality blitz on Saturday April 6th beginning at 9am. For those who are unfamiliar, the blitz entails sending pairs of volunteers out across the watershed to collect water samples in order to give us a snapshot of groundwater nitrogen levels in feeder streams across the Parkers Creek, Governors Run and Battle Creek watersheds.
We conduct this sampling in early April because it is before all the plants begin to use extra nitrogen to leaf out, and because it is when the leaves from the previous season have had the longest time to decompose and are no longer contributing much nitrogen to the streams. Therefore, a reading during this time and when there has not been rain within a few days prior gives a good reading of the baseline nitrogen in the streams.
