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What's With Water?

Learn about the different water near your town, city or community. Water Rangers has a great online platform where people share information about their local waterways, like temperature, PH level and water conductivity. What will you learn about your water?

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Plan

  • What body of water will you look at? If you look at a major body of water in your community (e.g. a lake or river), you will probably find more data available.
  • What do you want to learn about the water?
  • What can you test using supplies that you can easily get?
  • What do you already know about your local waterways?

Do

The Water Rangers website has a ton of great information gathered by people just like you! Volunteers go out in their communities and track different information about their local waterways.

  • Head to the data platform on the website and see if you can find a site near you with lots of observations – big bodies of water in central locations will often have lots of data!
  • How does the data change over time? What might impact the data? Consider things like weather (rain), temperature or even time of day.
  • Try to find a location near you – look at the data. If you were to test the water there, what do you think your measurements might look like?
  • If you can, go out and test the water! You may not be able to test everything, but you can use a thermometer to get a reading of the temperature and pool test strips to test the PH.

Review

  • Did anything surprise you? Why?
  • Will you go back and collect more data in the future? What changes might you see?
  • What human activities can have an impact on the health of water?
  • Remember to submit your activities on our Scouts for Sustainability Take Action Map to the Review section.

Materials

  • PH test strips (can be found in a pool supply store or aisle)
  • Thermometer
  • Notebook or other way to write down observations

Keep it Simple

  • Start out simple by learning about water’s PH and how easily it can be changed.

Take it Further

  • Become a water tester for your local camp! Next time you visit a camp, see if they have a water test kit, or bring your own. Use the test kit to measure the water data – then, make sure to record your observations. Each time you visit camp, make new observations.