This week marks my last week at Siena for the summer working on this project. Next week I will be working from home looking at all of the data we've collected so far and finalizing a poster for all of the work we've been doing since May. Although this project is definitely far from over, it's really cool to see how far we've come since my first day working on this project and to have an idea of where it will be going.
So far we have all of the data from the sediment samples collected and compiled into tables and figures. This data was able to show us some important information regarding the heavy metal in different areas of the Patroon Creek. There are a bunch of different heavy metals in the sediment, some at much higher concentrations than others. One sample showed consistently high levels of lead which was one of the target metals considering the old lead plant that used to be in operation right on the Patroon Creek. This information could help propel different approaches of mitigating the pollution of the Patroon Creek in terms of heavy metal contamination. Our data can also indicate areas that will need immediate attention, like the sites in Tivoli Lake, because of their high heavy metal content.
Our stream gauge data has not been collected yet because the loggers still need to collect some more daily data in order for us to have enough data to compare to the USGS data sets. This means that when I come back in September I get to go out in the field again and collect the stream gauge data (yay!). I'm very eager to see what data the loggers collected!
Another cool thing that came out of this project are the questions that I've thought of while working this summer. When we started this project in May we had one overarching question which was "What is the water quality of Patroon Creek and Tivoli Lake?" Although we are still trying to answer this question with stream gauge data, we already have an idea with the sediment sampling and XRF analysis, along with the macroinvertebrate sample we took a few weeks ago. While analyzing our data and reading other reports on Patroon Creek, I've thought of different questions that we can ask and different approaches to gather more data for our original question.
This summer has been very interesting and I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to work on this project. Now it's time to organize my brain because I have way too many thoughts when it comes to creating this poster!
