TIDE Aquascience: Introduction to the practical workshop Hello, my name is Professor Amanda Bamford and I'm here to give you a very short presentation on the Practical workshop Aquascience. Now this workshop is going to go through the practicalities of going out into the field and assessing the health of rivers and lakes and it's designed to go alongside the two lectures and the handbook and the tutor notes for Aquascience. The objectives of this practical workshop are so that by the end of the workshop you'll be able to take water and biological samples in the field from rivers and lakes and to do this safely. You'll be able to measure the physical chemical parameters of the rivers and lakes and assess the biodiversity of these rivers and lakes that you will visit. You'll be looking at the benthic invertebrates, the phytoplankton, zooplankton and you'll be collating the data and recording the results in a workbook. And then finally at the end of the workshop you'll be interpreting the results and coming to a conclusion. So the methodology in the approach... so usually this workshop goes over two days. So the first activity in the mornings will go out into the field to sample the sites. So we'll go out collect the samples like the biological organisms and the water samples and then we would come back to the laboratory in the afternoon to sort the samples, do the identification, ID the invertebrates and the diatoms and the phytoplankton and then record the data. And then in the final session at the end of the two days, we will discuss the class results and come up with a conclusions and on what are assessment is of the rivers and lakes that we visited during this workshop. So Activity one the fieldwork.... This is the fun bit. This is where we go out into the field taking all our equipment, our waders and nets, our sampling bottles and we'll go to the either a river or a lake (depending on what day we're working on) and take our samples. So first of all ...River by monitoring, so here we would take our Nets and collect the the benthic macroinvertebrates. So these are the invertebrates that live in on the bottom of our River and we would do three minute kick samples. So I've got a video here to show you of how you do a kick sample. So I'm now going to show you a video of Dr. Medupin demonstrating how to do a three minute kick sample and it's very important that the technique is done exactly as she just demonstrates and notice... She has all the safety equipment on, the waders, the gloves. This is very important when you're doing kick sampling that you are safe while doing so safely. So now we move on to Lake biomonitoring. So here again, we take our nets here. You can see a phytoplankton net and zooplankton. They looks very similar except for different size mesh. So phytoplankton... It has a 50 Micron mesh size. So it catches the very tiny microns, very tiny organisms and zooplankton net has a micron size of 250 microns. so it's a slightly larger slightly courser net. So we make sure before we go out in the field we take all that equipment with us. So we have our nets, we have our vials to put our samples in and we have our water bottles so we can wash any samples with caught in the bottom of our net into our vials and preserve them to take them back to the lab. We mustn't forget as well to take some water samples to take back to the lab to do any nutrient analysis that we might want to do or chlorophyll analysis. So we can also in the field do some physical and chemical monitoring so we can collect the biota with our nets but we also in the field we can measure pH, temperature and electrical conductivity. And also we can there's other things we can collect other data depending on our monitoring equipment that we have available. We can use very simple ones like this very nice handheld instrument and this one just measures temperature, pH and electrical conductivity or if you're lucky you can have available much more sophisticated equipment that can also measure turbidity and other things like nutrients, like nitrates and phosphates. So oxygen as well is a very important parameter to measure if you have the correct electrode. So we collect our measurements... physical and chemical measurements in situ. But we also bring back to the lab some water so we can measure nutrients back at the lab as well. So once we back in the laboratory what sort of things do we do? So we first of all we want to sort and identify our benthic macroinvertebrates. So we put them out into big trays and sort them into different taxa. So sometimes you can do this by eye with the bigger macroinvertebrates. Sometimes all we need is a magnifying glass handheld magnifying glass other times. We might want to put them in a Petri dish and put them under a low-power microscope. So all we need in the lab is some very simple equipment and then using ID books and websites (some of which I've given you links to in the handbook) we can go ahead and identify our macro invertebrates. We can also identify our lake organisms ... phytoplankton and zooplankton back in the laboratory. So what we would do is put a drop of our sample from our lakes and look for Daphnia and other zooplankton and also identify diatoms and microalgae that we might find in our Lake samples. Often to do this we would need a high-power microscope... some of the larger zooplankton you might be able to see them by just putting them in a Petri dish and put them under a low-power microscope or even with a handheld lens. But normally we would have to use a high-powered microscope to look at these much smaller organisms. And also have back in the lab we will do our nutrient analysis. So before we do any nutrient analysis, chemical analysis, we would have to filter the lake or river water and to do this we use a vacuum pump and a hand pressure with a 0.45 micron filter as shown here on the left hand side. Once we've filtered our nutrient samples, we could then use nutrient testing kits for phosphates and nitrates or ion electrode you might have available. There's lots of different methods for measuring nitrates, phosphates and ammonia and it very much depends on what equipment you have available. But very often when we're out in the field in when we don't have a fully functional lab available. We can often use very simple methods that are designed for aquarium water. So it depends very often what equipment you have available what methods you can use and how active Kira you can measure your nutrients. And then finally, we collate all these results... your identification of your macroinvertebrates. the zooplankton the phytoplankton collate them analyze the results share them as a class and then we would discuss and come up with some conclusion. And this is the fun part. This is where you reap the benefits of all your hard work during the practical workshop . And hopefully come up with a very good assessment of your river and lakes that you've been looking at. Is it good, very good, or poor quality?. So look at the handbook that comes with these lectures and this short presentation. In there it will go through in detail the methodology for assessing the health of your rivers and lakes. So, thank you for listening. Goodbye.