Ely Teragli at CWS sent this response to some teachers at OES and we thought others might find these links useful!
To teachers:
When Clean Water Services crews
sample water in the field they test for temperature, turbidity, pH, dissolved
oxygen and conductivity. Once samples are brought back to the lab they also
test for alkalinity, bacteria, ammonia and phosphorus in the lab but those test
are a bit more complicated and need specific instrumentation.
As far as historic water quality
data I usually direct people to the USGS
website. You can look up data collected at specific sites in the Tualatin
River Watershed. There’s a lot of info available, but it might be a good
exercise for students to figure out how to narrow the search.
To students:
Below are some documents that
might be helpful to support your beaver research question.
For the water quality piece,
there is a USGS continuous monitoring point on Fanno Creek at Durham
(monitoring happens daily). From this
site you can choose the water quality parameters you’d like (temp,
turbidity, pH, dissolved oxygen) and get a data table.
There is also monitoring data
for several spots along Fanno Creek where samples are taken and evaluated. That
data can also be found on the USGS
website. You can choose one or more sites on Fanno from the drop down list
and then choose a date range and some other values.
2550 SW Hillsboro Highway | Hillsboro, Oregon 97123
