From the Director

Thank you, volunteers, for a wonderful 2023. It has been a joy to celebrate some important milestones with you: the Big Celebration for our 30th birthday, three regional trips and receipt of the 2023 Keep Oklahoma Beautiful Visionary Leadership Award, to name a few. 

We are looking forward to 2024. If you have not received a 2024 Blue Thumb Calendar, ask your field person for one the next time you see her or him. The theme of the 2024 calendar is "responsible consumption." We are all consumers; there is no way around it. We can, however, make choices that are much more earth-friendly than the habits ingrained by advertising and social media. Each month, the calendar sidebar challenges you to change one habit. We will attempt these challenges along with you, and share our successes and difficulties on social media. We hope you will do the same.

I am trying to get warmed up for the journey as I complete my holiday shopping. I am asking myself questions like: Was this made locally? Is the packaging responsible? Could I give this friend or loved one an experience instead of purchase a gift? I look forward to taking this journey with you and becoming a slightly better inhabitant of this beautiful planet in the process.

Happy Holidays!

Rebecca Bond
Blue Thumb Director

From the Volunteer Coordinator

In addition to being the support mechanism for volunteers, Blue Thumb staff are involved in education.  This you know.  BT staff members have been working to find ways to talk with municipalities about stream protection.  The last few months have seen some breakthroughs! 

In September, I provided a presentation on streams as they flow through cities at the Oklahoma Municipal League’s annual conference.  As the name implies, OML is a membership organization for Oklahoma’s cities and towns, and it was employees from these towns that attended the presentation.

Second, the City of Glenpool invited Blue Thumb to provide a short seminar on stream protection for employees just last month.  The EnviroScape and tabletop rainfall simulator were “hands-on” elements, followed by a PowerPoint presentation.  This education event was less than two hours, which will hopefully make it a good fit for cities. 

If you monitor within the city limits of a community, let’s talk about bringing this stream protection seminar to your town.  Contact me to see how this might work. 

Volunteers in Action

The volunteers of three streams have made big headway in 2023 to get information out in their watersheds. These specific education efforts are being made on Coal Creek (Tulsa County), Okmulgee Creek (Okmulgee County), and Horse Creek and Grand Lake (Delaware and Ottawa Counties). 

A whole new way to look at and use data is being developed. Currently, there are no webinars slated for 2024, but if you have an interest in learning how the volunteers from these three streams are building awareness in their watersheds, will you please email me and let me know this is of interest to you?

It is important to add this:  LOTS of great information is being shared by Blue Thumb volunteers all over Oklahoma.  These are simply three watersheds that have been targeted to accomplish “data projects.”  If you have been monitoring long enough to have a fish collection for your stream, and you want to work on a data project in 2024, reach out and we will get started!

Cheryl Cheadle
Volunteer Coordinator

To our Monthly Monitors:

Happy Holidays to you one and all!!! The year is winding down and holiday happy chaos is in full swing. Temperatures are changing so please keep your reagents at a temperature above freezing.

So let's do a recap of this Fall QA (free answers to those who read this and haven’t done QA yet). In all honesty, QA is not about making 100%; it's really not a “test." It's  more about talking points and just checking in with you to see how your testing procedures are going. As I am writing this, I have not seen many results but have heard some comments – especially about Question #1.

Nitrate Standard Solution. This was a judgement call as I made the standard to a strength between two of the color swatches. We do want you to interpolate, especially on nitrate/nitrite and pH tests. Pick a number in between if the sample water testing color does not exactly match one of the color swatches. We did find a bad lot number (2005) which expires in December 2023. So this is another reason for QA. Something else I’d like to point out: I know some of these tests are timed and will continue to get darker as time goes on, but please take a couple extra seconds to truly look at the test result. Don’t just assume it will be “5” because that is what you usually get. And I know color tests are difficult as we all see color differently, that these are ‘screening’ tests and not really exact, that some people are color blind, etc. We just ask that you do the best you can. Thank you.

#1 Purpose of stir rod. This was interesting in that some people said “what is a stir rod?" This made me pause for a second, but then we educated about the stir rod and handed some out. The stir rod is a glass ‘Harry Potter wand’. You rinse it off with DI water and then put the rinsed end into your creek sample water bottle. EVERYTIME you draw out creek water you need to stir up the sample with the stir rod. This re-mixes the entire solution so you are testing evenly mixed creek water. Anything heavy will sink down to the bottom and separate out. Stirring of the sample water is good scientific technique.

#2 What to do if your chloride blank takes more then 1 drop (>5mg/L). The chloride blank is utilizing DI water, thus there should be no chloride present. But we do have to add one drop of silver nitrate to see a color change, thus 5 mg/L chloride for the blank means all is working well. When you are running your creek water samples, you are after the slightest color change to orange. So the answer to this question is, "Inform a Blue Thumb staff member if your chloride blank takes more then 1 drop of silver nitrate." We will work with you on the test, maybe switch out reagents or DI water.

#3 What is achieving good repeatability and why is it important. This is very open-ended and a great talking point. In short, both creek water tests should have very similar results for each test, and this makes your data/results more credible. This is another example of good scientific technique. Specifically, any titration test (oxygen and chloride) should be at most 2 drops difference. pH should be within 0.4 difference. Nitrate/Nitrite answers should be very close. Hard to say an exact number range on this as higher up in the scale there are big jumps: from 5-10-20-50. But in the lower range try for 0.5 difference. Orthophosphate should be within 3 marks on the wheel. If your creek water tests don’t have good repeatability, then do a third or maybe even a fourth test and hopefully two of those results should be within good repeatability. Please check your results for good repeatability before you clean up and see if you need to run any more tests to achieve it.

Kim Shaw
Blue Thumb QA Officer

Sometimes near the end of the year, people pause to consider how they might give to an important cause.  You have the ability to make a donation to Friends of Blue Thumb.  All active volunteers are members of Friends of Blue Thumb.  Your donation will help this small nonprofit organization to fund watershed education, volunteer monitoring efforts, outdoor education, and the Yard by Yard Community Resiliency Project. 

Please send your check to FBT, P.O. Box 58103, Oklahoma City, OK 73112. 

• Did you know that there is a whole association for Citizen Scientists? You can become a member and learn more about it here!
• Interested in checking out what others are doing in the realm of volunteer science? Take a look around CitSci.org.
• Don't forget about the "Stream Selfie," a project from the Izaak Walton League.

Oklahoma Conservation Commission

Oklahoma Conservation Districts

Project WET

Friends of Blue Thumb

Soil Health Program

Department of Environmental Quality

EnvironMentor

Macroinvertebrate ID Website