OOS 3-5
Engaging undergraduates, community and undergraduate faculty in local and regional water resource conservation
Ferrum College in Ferrum, Virginia has been engaging undergraduate students and faculty in a water quality program at Smith Mountain Lake and Claytor Lake, both in Southwest Virginia, for twenty-seven years. Faculty scientists and undergraduate students have worked with citizen scientists in the communities to take water samples and engage in measuring other water quality parameters while the students and faculty chemically analyze the samples and statistically analyze the results in order to prepare an annual report of the state of the water quality in these two lakes.
The citizen scientists who are lake residents are recruited and trained by the faculty and students at the beginning of the season and a report of reports and conclusions are presented at the end of the season each year. The citizen scientists collect water samples for nitrogen and phosphorus analysis, filter water for chlorophyll-a measurement and measure water clarity every other week. The intervening weeks the students travel around the lake to pick up the samples and filters the citizen scientists have collected the previous week and take them to the Water Quality Lab for analyses.
The Ferrum College scientists, who supervise the project, train the students each year.
Results/Conclusions
The interactions among the undergraduate students, the community as represented by the citizen scientists, and the undergraduate faculty has been very successful for many reasons. The students gain confidence in their ability to inform the citizen scientist about the characteristics of lakes and water resources conservation and the citizen scientists become more engaged in preserving a valuable resource and that they can make a significant contribution to conservation to water resources. The faculty at a Ferrum College benefit from the close association with the local community and its citizens.
An additional benefit is that the relevant environmental agencies, local regional and national, use the information and data collected though this project to make policy decisions and land use decisions in order to preserve the water quality of these bodies of water. Smith Mountain Lake and Claytor Lake have exhibited improved water quality over the may years of the study because of the knowledge gained from this college and community collaboration.