One might think that, as watershed stewards, our stock in trade would be water. But really, there’s not much we can do about water. We can’t make more of it. That’s the job of nature. We can’t manage it. That’s the job of the community, the Regional District, the Province, and the government of Canada. All we can do is study it and raise the alarm if we see something worrisome.
Our real stock in trade is numbers. For instance, what was the number of cubic metres of water flowing in Waterloo Creek last year at this time. Or how many metres below Stelling Road does the sand and gravel layer give way to shale. Or how much does the water level in the Fanny Bay Community Hall well drop during a large event. All these different numbers have their own collection methods. Many are collected automatically by data logging sensors. Some are collected by dint of hard physical labour. But perhaps the quaintest collection method is the hand-written logs we keep when doing our routine water quality sampling.
Sampling is the heart of our program. We have been doing it since our earliest days. We would tromp off to our three creeks carrying our gear and our waterproof logbook and several pencils (you don’t want to be up the creek without a pencil). We would carefully write the time and date, our names, the weather, and then all the quality parameters (dissolved oxygen, conductivity, pH, temperature, and turbidity). One of us would write while another would take the readings. Our notebooks slowly began to fill up. We started entering our data into spreadsheets for easier analysis and comparisons.
Now, however, we are sampling almost 20 creeks at 29 sites. We have two rock-star volunteers who transfer the data from written form to spreadsheets. We have other volunteers who review the data and check for errors. Then we massage this data into a format for uploading to DataStream, the website that hosts water quality data from all over Canada. And we do this 31 times a year. It’s become quite an ordeal.
Much as we love our little waterproof logbooks, and the tactile pleasure of the lead scritching across the page while the creek burbles and birds flit about in the trees, it’s time to bring some technology to bear on the problem. We have hired a developer to build us a custom app that will allow data entry on our phones. The numbers will go straight to a spreadsheet, somewhere in the cloud and we will save a ton of work.
As an avowed data aficionado, I find this exciting. As someone who still has a few fountain pens and an assortment of drafting equipment, I find this very sad. But all is not lost. We will be using the new app alongside our trusty notebook for the initial testing period and maybe for quite some time after that. You never know. There could be a power outage, and the internet could be down, and we might suddenly need to know what the turbidity of Wilfred Creek was last year. It’s comforting to know that we could still access our little yellow books to find the answer.