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SMSU students mentor Marshall Public School youths in measuring water quality

MARSHALL — Nineteen Southwest Minnesota State University students became teachers for a day as part of the Redwood River Mentoring and Monitoring Project on Thursday throughout the Marshall area.

The university students took what they learned in the classroom about river water quality and the methods used to analyze different parameters and shared that information with Marshall Public School science students in a hands-on way. Together, they measured a variety of those parameters at three different points along the Redwood River.

“It’s been pretty fun and we get to learn about things I didn’t know before,” seventh-grader Janee Patterson said. “I like science. You get to learn a lot of things you don’t know or you can learn more about the things you do know. It’s really fun, especially doing the experiments.”

Project coordinator Dr. Emily Deaver, Environmental Science Professor at SMSU, said the project is focused on active learning, civic engagement and collaboration between the university and local secondary schools.

“The project allows students to make a connection to the area in which they are living, apply their knowledge to current, field-based issues and allow university students to serve as important role models and mentors for area students,” Deaver said.

The Redwood River Mentoring and Monitoring Project started in fall 2004. Since then, more than 3,600 students have taken part in the experience — about 270 students are involved each year — in either the spring of the fall. Ten teachers, including Marshall High School biology teacher Holly Knudson and seventh-grade science teacher Dr. Carrie Sueker, have also been involved in the project over the years.

“It’s going surprisingly well (Thursday) considering the conditions we’re working in,” Deaver said. “It’s a beautiful day and not windy, but there’s a lot of snow on the ground. It could be a lot worse.”

Together with the younger students — rotating between seventh graders and high school students — the SMSU mentors each measured two or three of the nine parameters.

The groups started at Skunk Hollow road, where the river leaves town and goes through agricultural field. At the second site — near the bridge along Seventh Street near Justice Park — SMSU student Tanner Differding helped Jadan Maurice and Nick Kayser measure turbidity with a Secchi tube.

“This is the simplest way to measure water clarity,” Differding said. “This one was 9 centimeters. Anything under 20 is really not good. But it’s just with all the snow melting right now. When the snow melts, it picked up grit and sand and that gets into the river. That’s why it’s so cloudy.”

Differding is optimistic that conditions will improve in the near future.

“It should clear up when we get all this snow out of here and maybe get a rain,” he said. “It’ll get better as the year goes on.”

Working with Darshan Thapa, SMSU student Miles Christopher also measured turbidity.

“Technically, turbidity is the amount of light that is scattered, like when you shine a light through milk, it scatters it a lot,” Christopher said. “So that means it’s very turbid. Water normally is less turbid, so it doesn’t scatter as much light. But if you look down at a lake bed or something, you can’t see the bottom normally because there’s particulate matter. We usually just say it measures how cloudy it is.”

Christopher noted that it is important to make sure the river is healthy and growing in the ecosystem.

“That’s why we’re going to be measuring these values (Thursday),” he said. “We’ve got two methods. We’ve a LaMotte test kit, which involves putting drops of a certain chemical, basically, into the water (sample). And then we’re also going to use a LabQuest, which is an electronic form of the same thing. It uses a nice sensor that can do it automatically as long as we calibrate it properly.”

SMSU student Kassidy Przymus mentored Dillon Loft and Sam Griebel at the 7th Street bridge and Abdulmalik Hassan and Anna Rahm at the third location — the Wayside Rest just south of Marshall.

“There are two types of plankton around here,” Przymus shared with the students. “There’s phytoplankton and zooplankton. They’re the small organisms that live in the water.”

While they were measuring a water sample, Przymus said that if the pH level in the river drops too much, those organisms would die.

“The pH is the measuring of the hydrogen ions that is in the water to determine if the sample is acidic, basic or neutral,” she said. “It should be between 0-14.”

The pH level ended up being 7.0.

“It’s pretty much neutral, so that’s good,” Przymus said. “It can’t drop below 5 or it’s bad for aquatic life and plants.”

While the original plan was for the SMSU students to do the mentoring on Monday morning, a two-hour late start — necessary for cleanup efforts due to a blizzard on Saturday — forced project into a one-day collaboration.

“The university students would’ve taught the seventh graders and high schoolers on Monday and those kids would be doing all the measuring themselves at the river (Thursday), with just the university students overseeing to make sure they’re doing it right,” Deaver said.

“But because of the snow and late start on Monday, we’re trying to cram both the mentoring and monitoring together. It’s fun to see the interaction between the students.”

Deaver said her class consists of SMSU students from a wide-variety of majors, but that they are all well prepared.

“The university students do a great job because they’ve been working on this stuff for a few weeks,” she said. “They know it pretty well.”

The deep snow kept the students away from the river bank for the most part, but it didn’t hinder the experience.

“Usually, we’d be closer to the river, but we do get a bucket and put it on the bank because we don’t let students wade in the river, for liability issues,” Deaver said. “Students usually walk along the banks of the river and look for indications of animal life — are there raccoon tracks? Are there shells from mussels? And various things like that. But it’s pretty tough to see with all the snow.”

Other parameters measured were dissolved oxygen, water temperature, nitrate, phosphate, ammonia, alkalinity and flow.

“We modified a few other things because the river is so high,” Deaver said. “There’s a flow probe that they normally would stand at the edge and put down in the river. But we decided not to do that. We have a different method they’re measuring flow with (Thursday).”

Deaver added that the project was able to expand and include broader outreach in 2016 because of funding provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fun (ENRTF) as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on the Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).

“We included a component working with Ag Education majors at SMSU and FFA students at Marshall High School,” she said.

All data can be found on the SMSU website (www.smsu.edu) under the Environmental Science home page. Look for the Redwood River Mentoring and Monitoring Project link.

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