On 6 October 2010, youth from across the USA will participate in the third annual 4-H National Youth Science Day. This year’s experiment is called 4-H20, and as the name implies, focuses on water quality. The experiment, developed by the North Carolina State University’s cooperative extension and North Carolina A&T State University, can be downloaded from the 4-H website at https://site.4-h.org/nysd/, and invites participants to study the effects of an increasingly heated environment on living algae.
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Water quality is a fitting theme for several reasons. First, water quality is something that people in many parts of the world take for granted, but is sorely lacking in many other parts of the world. Poor water quality is frequently identified as the world’s number one health risk. Investigating it leads into excellent discussions about the hydrologic cycle, watersheds, water use, human impacts on water, water-related recreation and hazards, and much more. Second, water quality is something easily investigated and helps students get out in the field. Third, because water quality measurements take place in specific locations, it can be mapped and analyzed using a GIS. How does water quality vary across a stream segment, a pond, a region, or a country, or between a lake versus tap water, and why? Fourth, students can continue their investigations by participating in the 2010 Geography Awareness Week next month, where the theme is fresh water.
GIS is the perfect tool for studying water quality. GIS can be used to map water quality variables that students have collected in the field. Water quality measures, such as conductivity, can be mapped as graduated symbols, as pie charts where each wedge is a different variable, and analyzed with geostatistical techniques. Numerous water-related lessons exist in the Our World series and in the ArcLessons library such as “water use analysis with GIS”, which invites analysis of county-level data about water and its impact on other variables using regression analysis, hot spot, scatterplot, and other techniques.
Since water quality is not just something to be concerned about for one day each year, how will you investigate water quality not only today, but beyond? How can you get involved in the Esri 4-H GIS program?
-Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager
