Water Quality Monitoring

Beginning August of 2022, a graduate student at UNK, Jamila Bajelan, has collected water quality data at KOLA. She uses a water sensing instrument to measure parameters such as temperature, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and pH. Measurements are collected from three water bodies at KOLA: the ditch, pond, and creek.  

Water quality data can serve many purposes. To date, the data has been made available to undergraduate students in an Ecology class at UNK. One of the most important purposes is that this data collection will serve as a start of a long-term dataset that can be combined with other observations and measurements. As an example, when an undergraduate student used camera traps to conduct a pond usage study, she observed that many birds were on the north side of the pond. Had the water quality data been collected at that time, maybe the data could support a possible hypothesis as to why the birds choose that side of the pond.  

Water quality is one of several datasets that are being collected at KOLA, along with observations of sights and sounds, natural history, and ecohydrology phenomena, to help us better understand this place in the Platte River watershed. 

Multiprobe Sensor

Instrument used to measure parameters of water quality and example of probe suspended in water.