Stream Fieldwork

Year five have doing stream fieldwork, which involved us looking at a range of different aspects about our local school stream. During this time we took a look at how many plants, creatures, and rocks were found in our stream, during the quadrant count. This was done by marking out a square metre with string and counting what we saw within the quadrant. We also measured water clarity by pouring water into a special water clarity measuring tube. We then very slowly moved a small disk away from the person who was looking at the disk. When the person could not see the disk they called out “STOP” and we looked at how far the disk was and recorded it. This gave us an indication as to how clear our stream water is and how healthy our stream is. We also measured temperature in certain places of the stream, we did this by putting a thermometer in the deep water and the shallow water and recorded temperature. Each recording was taken several times, to enable us to find the average reading. Finally, we measured the water velocity by dropping a Ping-Pong ball into the stream and timed it to see how long it took the ball to float five meters when it had finished we recorded the time. by Archie & Flynn