Today I did not check any of the hair snares because I had to work on the quarterly water monitoring project. Lori, Martin, and I headed out around 10:30am to 13 sites that we monitor monthly. This includes checking pH, conductivity, temperature, salinity and TDS. Since it is the quarterly check we also take flow measurements and collect samples from each site to send off to a lab to check levels of iron, calcium, manganese, and aluminum. Martin came from Fairmont, WV which is almost 2 hours away, so we could use his flow meter -- it was very nice of him to drive all this way to help us out, Thank you Martin!! With the meter you have a pole that has a bulb attached to the bottom that is the sensor. This pole also takes a depth measurement and you want to take reading about every 2ft across the whole width of the river and you want to average about 16 readings per site. If the river is not wide enough to get 16 readings every 2ft then you lessen the distance between each reading. The meter measure the flow in feet/second (ft/s). It was really fun to check and neat to see the flow rates, and he even let me use it at one of the sites (sadly we did not get any pictures of me using it).
After we collected all the data and the water samples (which need to be kept on ice until the lab comes to pick them up tomorrow) we headed back to the office for a late lunch. Martin and Lori headed off and I finished fixing the rest of the hair snares that were in the office -- 13 in total today!
Martin using his flow meter at our first test site for the day
Almost all the way across
Martin stretching out the measuring tape and me collecting water samples for the lab!
Me using handheld meter to check the pH, salinity, conductivity, TDS & temp.
Martin sampling, me recording
All done!
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