Equipping communities in data-deficient areas

Water Rangers through the help of WWF and Loblaw is building water quality testing capacity in 25 data deficient sub-watersheds! We’re equipping communities with inexpensive citizen science testkits, providing online training, and connecting them to a growing network of communities participating in citizen monitoring. This program is a catalyst for further testing in their regions, and our dream is that it will provoke meaningful progress toward protecting freshwater. Using equipment that allow testers to understand basic water health parameters such as temperature, clarity, pH, hardness, alkalinity, dissolved oxygen and conductivity, we’ll help them create baseline data and educate their communities on the value of long-term monitoring, all while giving them tools to manage it long-term.

Citation

Citizen scientists using the Water Rangers testkit. 2023-11-15. "Equipping communities in data-deficient areas" (dataset). 3.30.0. DataStream. https://doi.org/10.25976/aqpr-e356.

Funding Sources

World Wildlife Fund Canada and the Loblaw Water Fund

Data Collection Information

The date, time, weather, and name of the body of water is first recorded. A thermometer is then used to determine the air temperature. An approximately 200mL sample of water is then collected using a rinsed sample cup from 10cm below the water surface. A AZ8361 pen-type Conductivity/ Total Dissolved Solids meter is immediately inserted into the water sample to measure the conductivity and temperature of the water sample. A Taylor Technologies Spa test strip is then inserted into the water sample for 2 seconds. The total bromine/pH/total alkalinity/total hardness measurements are recorded from this test strip 20 seconds after it has been taken out of the water sample. A secchi disk is then used to measure water clarity. The secchi disk is slowly lowered into the water, and is stopped at the point at which the observer can no longer see the secchi disk in the water. The original sample is then discarded, and a new sample of water is collected from the location 10cm below the water surface using a Dissolved Oxygen sample cup from the CHEMetrics Dissolves Oxygen K-7512 kit. A dissolved oxygen ampoule is immediately inserted into the sample, and is broken at the weak point in the ampoule. The ampoule is then inverted twice, and the dissolved oxygen measurement is taken after 120 seconds has elapsed. The measurement is taken by comparing the colour of the ampoule to the liquid comparators that are included in the CHEMetrics kit.

Attribution Licence (ODC-By) v1.0

You are free to share, copy, distribute, use, modify, transform, build upon, and produce works from the data as long as you attribute any public use of the data, or works produced from the data, in the manner specified in the licence. For any use or redistribution of the data, or works produced from it, you must make clear to others the licence of the data and keep intact any notices on the original data. https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/

Data Disclaimer

No data within this dataset is guaranteed to be accurate.

API Access

curl -G https://api.datastream.org/v1/odata/v4/Records --data-urlencode "\\$filter=DOI eq '10.25976/aqpr-e356'" -H "x-api-key: PRIVATE-API-KEY"

Changelog