World Water Day is coming up on Tuesday, and in celebration, EOS Eco Energy is offering people a close-up look at some of the brooks and streams in their own watershed.
In an online lunch and learn session on Tuesday, EOS’s Miranda Corkum and Lauren Clark will present the results of water and habitat assessments from the Tantramar River Watershed.
CHMA spoke with the pair earlier this week to find out more about how they are studying the watershed, and what they learned.
This is the second time that EOS has done sampling in the Tantramar River watershed after starting its water monitoring project in 2018, funded by the New Brunswick Environmental Trust.
“The health of the Tantramar River watershed is good,” says Corkum, but that ‘good’ should be taken with a grain of salt. In the index system used to measure watercourses across Canada, “good actually really means average,” says Corkum. “It doesn’t mean, you know, pristine water or anything… There’s a lot of room for improvement. We have some highly impacted rivers in this watershed.”
Corkum will present the detailed results of testing in tomorrow’s session, including looking at pH, temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, total dissolved solids, and salinity. In addition, Corkum also sent samples for lab analysis regarding 59 different parameters. “We got down really into the nitty gritty of the chemistry of the water,” says Corkum.
Clark will give the results of her close up physical observations of Joe Brook, which runs under Mount View Road and into Silver Lake. Clark and her team did water quality and habitat assessments every 25 meters along the along a 7.7 kilometre stretch of Joe Brook.
At this point, the data that EOS is collecting is still considered baseline data, says Corkum, meaning that they are still establishing what’s normal for the watershed, in hopes that they will then be able to spot anomalies or problems later. But the team is also keeping track of land use changes around their testing sites, to help explain changes documented over time.
“Even though we’re measuring chemistry, we do still look around to see what else might have changed in the last three years at our sampling sites,” says Corkum. “Like, has there been new logging, or have they cleared more brush off roads? At the Folkins Drive site, there was a new bridge built this year… We try to pay attention if there’s been any changes that we can see in sort of agriculture or land use,” she says. For example, when the team was doing monitoring in the Rockport-Dorchester area last year, they noticed a lot of new logging activity. “So that was something that we could record and use that to help understand the numbers,” says Corkum.
You can find out more about the event here.