SMART Watersheds Project
The SMART Watersheds Project 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.
Your Role as a Community Scientist
You will gain access to data and monitoring equipment associated with two new programs, Weather Watch and Water Watch.
Weather Watch involves accessing weather data on a publicly accessible data portal for current weather and historical weather conditions in your community.
Water Watch involves booking a water quality monitoring kit from your local library and engaging in some self-guided training sessions. From there you will sample water quality and soil saturation at 9 community monitoring stations in our watersheds. 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
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 for outside temperature, humidity, precipitation, barometric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction, as well as solar radiation and what moon phase we are seeing in our night sky.
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.
Weather Station
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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.
Monitoring Station at Corbett Creek
SMART Water Watch Kit
Becoming a WATER Watcher
This spring, we will have a collection of 9 SMART Monitoring Kits located in local libraries in Whitby, Oshawa, and Clarington for you to book out for your class or family and head out to one of our SMART Watershed Water Watcher Monitoring Stations.
The kit consists of water quality and soil quality monitoring probes and your data can be collected and entered into the SMART Watersheds Data Portal. Participants will be required to participate in a one hour online training workshop and have a library card in good standing for the library where you reserve the SMART Watershed Water Watcher Monitoring Kit.
If you are interested in the Water Watcher program, please add your name to our contact list below and we will let you know when the program is up and running.
COMING SOON!
Thanks to the generous support of RBC Tech for Nature for funding this three-year program, 2020 to 2023.
