SMART Watersheds Project
The SMART Watersheds Project includes the Weather Watcher and Water Watcher components and is designed to create a technology ecosystem, enhancing our environmental monitoring activities with more frequent data collection, analysis, and advanced data management. In addition to the technology, the SMART Watersheds engages community volunteers, the general public, elementary, high school and post-secondary students in using this new technology in their local watershed.
Our goal is to provide the hands-on tools and technology for the watershed community to help us collect the data we need to help us adapt to climate change and to maintain healthy watersheds.
Becoming a WEATHER Watcher
Access our weather data portal for current and historical weather conditions in your community!
Ideal for in the classroom and at home for families wanting to become more weather-wise.
In partnership with some of our watershed libraries, schools, and businesses, we have installed six state-of-the-art weather stations around the CLOCA watershed. These state-of-the-art weather stations use Davis Weatherlink cloud-based software to collect data every 10 minutes.
The data collected includes outside:
-
temperature
-
humidity
-
precipitation
-
barometric pressure
-
wind speed
-
wind direction
-
solar radiation
-
moon phase
Weather Station
For High School and Post-Secondary Students, we challenge you to explore our weather watch portal and develop your own project or program to better understand weather conditions and how to develop strategies to address climate change in your community. Check out the portal below for real-time and historical weather data.
.jpg)
Becoming a WATER Watcher
Complete our self-guided online training, pick up a SMART Water Monitoring Kit at a local library and head out to do some water and soil testing in the community!
Designed for use in middle and high school classrooms as well as for families and individuals interested in becoming more water-wise.
Steps
1. Work through self-guided training videos.
-
Safety Training (7 min)
-
Water Sampling Training (1 min)
-
Water Testing Training (2.5 min)
-
Soil Testing Training (2 min)
2. Pick up a Kit from your local library.
SMART Water Monitoring Kits are available to check out at Clarington, Oshawa, and Whitby Public Libraries!
The Kit contains water quality and soil quality monitoring testers, everything you'll need to complete the testing, and instructions for entering the data into our portal.
3. Head out with your Kit to collect data at one of the eight sampling hubs.
The measurements you will collect include:
Water Tester (PCTS Tester 5)
-
pH
-
Salinity
-
Conductivity
-
Temperature
-
Total Dissolved Solids
Soil Tester (Kelway)
-
soil mosture
-
soil pH
4. Enter the data you collected online in the SMART Watersheds Data Portal
This portal is where you can enter data, view previous data collected at the hubs, and view the training videos.
The data you collect supplements what is being automatically collected from real-time water quality probes. This information can help protect drinking water sources and address drinking water source protection plan policy.
Thank you for helping us adapt to climate change and to maintain healthy watersheds!
Water Kit
Climate Change at Home, Work and School
Check out these Canadian Resources for mitigating Climate change at home, school, and in your community.
In addition to giving you the tools to understand weather, we want to give you some ideas on how you can mitigate the impacts of climate change every day. We know the weather is changing and there are things we can do to better understand those changes as we all see the real evidence of the wetter, warmer and wilder weather already.
Thanks to the generous support of RBC Tech for Nature for funding this three-year program, 2020 to 2023.
