DataStream Launches New Interactive Guide to Water Quality
January 26, 2021
A new online tool helps explain how water quality is measured and why it matters.
The illustrated guide provides an introduction to some of the most important and commonly monitored aspects of water quality, including:
- physical properties, such as water clarity, pH and temperature
- chemical substances, like nutrients, metals, minerals and pollutants from human activity, and;
- biological characteristics, including coliform bacteria and chlorophyll
Taken together these types of measurements can give us an indication of how healthy the water is and, importantly, how it may be changing over time.
Alongside local, place-based, and Traditional/Indigenous knowledge, this information can support decision-making and action to help protect our waters, so they remain healthy for generations to come.
Illustrations throughout the guide help explain water quality characteristics in an accessible format, such as this one for freshwater conductivity.
To explore the water quality guide, visit datastream.org/guide.
Supporting standardized community-based water quality monitoring in the Greater Vancouver region
Nikki Kroetsch is a big believer in the power of community-based creek monitoring. Governments don’t have the capacity to monitor every little waterway, she says, which has led to many stewardship groups doing the work.
Community Based Monitoring in Action – The PEI Watershed Alliance
For the Prince Edward Island Watershed Alliance (PEIWA) the benefits of being based in a small province are clear. “We can be really interconnected, and we can facilitate working together” explains Angela Banks, Project Manager at the Alliance, “when it comes to data management and equipment sharing and stuff like that it’s been really, really helpful to have that umbrella organization.”
DataStream Publishes Open Data Standard to Support Water Science
The publication of an open data standard is enabling valuable freshwater data to be organized, accessed, and shared in a harmonized way. This data standard underpins DataStream, a growing online platform for sharing water data collected by Canada’s diverse water monitoring and research community.