As excited as I was for the opportunity to serve for the Squam Lakes Association, I found myself having a difficult time describing this position to my friends and family back home. At least in my inner circle, it’s not too often you see someone excited about moving away for a year, living with strangers, and…remind me what you're doing with the water again?
As a Watershed Resources Assistant, most of my duties this winter have involved collecting lake water samples and recording data on the ice. Dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and total phosphorus are just some of the metrics we’ll be collecting from the water throughout the year, with new additions like caffeine. Without special equipment to measure these factors, there is almost no way to identify them; however, they serve as concrete indicators of the current health of lake systems. This makes long-term water quality monitoring essential to keeping water bodies of the Lakes Region as pristine as they can be for many years to come.
I think it’s easy for this kind of science to fly under the radar. Unless you know what our bright orange beanies represent, it would be difficult to know what we were doing out there. So far, the only folks who happened to stumble into us while we were sampling asked us what we were catching that day. Environmental monitoring as a whole is not something the general public gets to see too often, so I honestly can’t expect folks to know these things happen behind the scenes.
In fact, water quality sampling feels a bit like a spy mission, or a heist. With our ski masks and toe warmers, we trek to our designated coordinates, drill through the ice with our auger, gather our data, collect a water sample, pack everything out: mission accomplished. On a good day, we can finish sampling a site in under an hour. While my role might not be as well-known, it’s still important, and I’m grateful to be a part of this amazing AmeriCorps crew. I love seeing other people enjoy the ice while I’m out there, and I’m looking forward to enjoying the water myself once it warms up just a little bit.
