From the Volunteer Coordinator
The bitter cold, ice, and snow of the last ten days found me primarily staying at home. During one spell between snow storms when the weather let up, I met my monitoring partner Kim Watson at Coal Creek in south Tulsa County. It was cold, and it was not time for monitoring, but it was time to get beautiful creek photographs! I hope you were able to take and submit some great photographs too.
Our Governor came on television with a message of conservation. People being willing to turn down the thermostat a bit and unplug some appliances helped our state to avoid complete power failures. It is difficult to be prepared for such a long, frigid spell.
A lesson I like to take from the Governor's request for conservation is this: Let's work at being conservationists in good weather and bad. Let's use our share and no more, and let's be reasonable when we consider just how much makes our share.
Protecting our environment can be a way of life. Mixing in thinking about the greater good can take place when making a grocery list, planning a vacation, paying the bills. Now that we are thawing, let's remember: it is easier to plan for protecting the environment when we actually spend time outdoors. This can be food for thought when next you approach your stream on monitoring day.
Do you regularly read your newsletter? The Blue Thumb staff works to put interesting information together for you, information that will help do your part toward being an earth steward. A special little gift is available to one volunteer. It will be given away by a drawing. The gift will be a small "Earth Day" exhibit that would look good in a library, in a city hall, in a small business, in your office, or in a school lab. The little exhibit will offer information about the Blue Thumb Program and we can even work together to make it specific to your stream!
Enter the drawing for the exhibit by emailing me or sending me a text (918-398-1804). I will write your name on a sheet and put it in a special little box. The drawing will be held on March 20, the first day of spring. No more entries will be accepted after noon on 3/19. Don't miss a chance to step into spring set up for doing more good work!
Yard by Yard is a community resiliency project that Blue Thumb helps sponsor. The goal is for the Yard by Yard to one day exist in communities all across Oklahoma. Be watching your next "From the Water's Edge" for an update of all the conservation districts that will be offering the program in Oklahoma. To learn just a bit now, click here.
Cheryl Cheadle
Volunteer Coordinator
To our Monthly Monitors:
Howdy Howdy from your QA Officer,
Sometime in January, I was taking the Winter 2020 raw bug results through their metrics and basic statistics, and I noticed a pattern in the data from creek sites in the Central Irregular Plains ecoregion. For the Winter 2020 season, the Central Irregular Plains ecoregion had the 2nd most bug samples with 20 samples (Central Great Plains had the most). I was noticing that most sites were scoring a "C" grade with a few "B" and a couple "D" grades. I was sad to see this. So doing some math today to look at average scores and compare to the previous winter, to see if my quick observation was in fact true, the numbers do show that the Central Irregular Plains creek sites in Winter 2020 do in fact score significantly lower than Winter 2019 samples. So here are some numbers that I calculated:
- Winter 2019 - Central Irregular Plains: total of 16 samples averaged a score of 54.56% resulting in a "B" grade
- Winter 2020 - Central Irregular Plains" total of 20 samples averaged a score of 37.70% resulting in a "C" grade
- Even more interesting, when I compared the exact same 14 sites from Winter 2019 to Winter 2020, 2019 averaged 54.79% and 2020 averaged 40%
I have no answer(s) to my observation and numbers above, but I just thought it was very interesting and it led my mind to wonder what changes happened between the Winter 2019 sampling period and the Winter 2020 sampling period, especially when 14 of the creek sites were the same. I just wanted to bring my observation to your attention, but also note that more data are generated when you start to compare and contrast datasets looking for trends or patterns. This will most likely lead to more questions than answers, but isn't that what science is all about? Blue Thumb is not just about science, chemistry, and biology; there is a lot of math and graphing that can be done with Blue Thumb data as well. With the launch of the App Map data viewer, these data are at your fingertips.
Kim Shaw
Blue Thumb QA Officer
|
