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 nine 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.
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.
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.
1. Work through self-guided training videos.
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Safety Training (7 min)
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Water Sampling Training (1 min)
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Water Testing Training (2.5 min)
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Soil Testing Training (2 min)
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2. Pick up a Kit.
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.
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3. Head out with your Kit to collect data at one of the eight sampling hubs. The measurements you will collect include:
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Water Tester (PCTS Tester 5)
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pH
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Salinity
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Conductivity
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Temperature
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Total Dissolved Solids
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Soil Tester (Kelway)
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soil moisture
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soil pH
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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.
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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!
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.