How do we determine whether a stream is “healthy” or water is “clean”? The answer may be more complicated than you would expect. At Community Science Institute, we measure a wide range of water quality indicators. These may also be called “analytes” (things we are analyzing). To help you understand what different results on our database might mean, we’ve put together a fact sheet on each of our analytes. You can download these fact sheets for your own use if you’d like, or just peruse them here.
Learning Materials
Community Science Institute's Water Indicators
pH | Conductivity | Chloride | Alkalinity | Turbidity
Curious where we get the numbers and facts on these sheets? Check out our reference table to see our sources.
Water Quality Report Card
The Water Quality Report Card is a new educational tool published by CSI that guides kids and families through a self-led exploration of the aquatic life found in streams and what different types of life indicate about water quality. The report card is a wonderful tool for outdoor and at-home education, providing children and families with the opportunity to learn more about environmental sciences. These guides are free and available upon request. You can pick up a Water Quality Report Card from the CSI’s water testing lab here in Ithaca, or you can also request booklets from CSI by emailing Biomonitoring Coordinator Adrianna Hirtler.
We look forward to helping you get outside, explore your favorite stream, and learn about the amazing world of water!
Need help assembling the booklet? Click here for instructions.
Water Quality Report Card Presentation
Are you an educator or parent looking for some help introducing the Water Quality Report Card activity to your students or children? If so, this Water Quality Report Card Training Presentation is for you! Developed by CSI’s Biomonitoring Coordinator, Adrianna Hirtler, this presentation will help you teach basic concepts of stream ecology, benthic macroinvertebrate identification, and the learning activities covered in the Water Quality Report Card.
We love to meet the educators using our learning materials. To view and download the presentation, please submit the form below.
If you are an educator participating in Discover Cayuga Lakes’s Trout in the Classroom Program, please use the link below:
Guide to Different Types of Graphs
This Guide to Types of Graphs and their Uses is a new educational tool geared toward adults. This simple infographic will guide you through four basic types of graphs. An example is given for each using real data from CSI’s database. Alongside the example is a description of the type of data for which this graph is useful and a description of how it is used effectively in the example. You can refer back to this resource if you are ever unsure of how to best depict trends in data!
Water Quality Database Scavenger Hunt
The Water Quality Database Scavenger Hunt is a new educational tool geared toward adults. This was published for our Water Quality Database Workshop, an event designed to guide attendees through CSI’s database. By posting it here, free for download, we are inviting you to take this journey through our database on your own time! Once you can find the values and information prompted in this activity, you will be more familiar with navigating our in-depth database.
These questions will also encourage you to think critically about how water quality is (or is not) regulated—don’t expect every prompt to have a simple or straightforward answer! The second page gives a brief overview of a few water quality indicators we use in our sampling. If you have any questions about how to find the answers, please reach out to our Outreach and Programs Coordinator, Grace Haynes, at aghaynes@communityscience.org.
