Authors

Date

4-30-2009

Document Type

Presentation

School

Mashpee High School, Mashpee, Massachusetts

Teacher

Tom Hoppensteadt

Students

Rachael Fermino, Andrew Lovely, Josh Flores, Jerry Carter, Carl Fiester, Nikki Vachon, Shauna Dacus, Lila Mooney, Briana Burke, Catie Furbush, Chris Tosches, Ross Lippman, Zack Benton, Ashley Wires, Ashley Souza, Cassie Fernandes, Julia Waechter

Description

The Mashpee High School Environmental Science students studied the watershed of the Quashnet River (also known as the Moonakis River) in Mashpee and Falmouth, MA. The river empties into Waquoit bay. It supports animals such as alewife, eels, brook trout, and herring. This river is vital to the sustainability of these animals. Macroinvertebrate sampling took place on March 4th, 2009, while the water chemistry testing took place on September 15th, 2008.

Specific water samples were tested for Dissolved Oxygen, temperature, pH, turbidity, and nutrients. The Water Quality Index (WQI) had to be weighted since certain parameters were not able to be measured. Our weighted WQI index was 73.4, which constitutes Good Water Quality.

Also observed were 362 macroinvertebrates within 20 families. This allowed an analysis of water quality for the river by considering published tolerance and intolerance values for these macroinvertebrate families. The macroinvertebrate testing found many organisms including: Caddisflies, Mayflies, Midges, Dragon Flies, Beetles, and Scuds. Interpretation of the data produced a Family Biotic Index (FBI) as a measure of quality. FBI’s for two sites up and down stream of a road produces values of 3.62 and 3.8 respectively. This is an excellent rating for upstream and a very good rating for downstream.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Download

Share

Project Location

 
COinS