CHALLENGE: Tanyard Branch drains urban areas of Athens, flowing by Bolton Dining Hall before crossing Lumpkin Street and passing under Sanford Stadium. Like most urban streams, Tanyard suffers from impaired water quality and degraded aquatic habitat.
RESPONSE: Monitoring equipment supplied by YSI through a special arrangement with the River Basin Center created an opportunity for a learning laboratory that could give students experience in stream monitoring while providing important data about land use impacts in the area.
Chemistry professor Franklin Leach maintains this equipment, collecting continuous data and populating a dashboard with the information.
This allows students to employ real world data from their own campus surroundings and facilitate true experiential learning. Twice a month, Leach and his undergraduate research team take physical samples to test in the lab and pull the deployed gear monthly to recalibrate the equipment.
TEAM: Franklin Leach, Chemistry Department of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences; Stream Dawg VIPR Team, led by Leach, Krista Capps (Ecology), Erin Lipp (Environmental Health Science), Seth Wenger (Ecology), Charles van Rees (Ecology)