Campus Pond - October 25th 2017

Lauren Ho
"Campus Pond Assessment"
Proctor Academy, Andover, NH
Date of Data Collection: October 14th (absent) // October 16 (absent) // October 17th, 2017

Over the past few days, Matilda, Sydney and I were observing, collecting and sampling data from the campus pond that lies in the centre of the Proctor Academy campus. This fieldwork and study that we were doing was the continuation of a ten year study started by the APES class of 2007, and we are collecting the tenth year of data from the same pond, my group specifically, was stationed at site 3. This site is referred to as the "beach" site, because it's a small sandy corner of the pond, although it has now been overgrown and much of the sandy part has been covered by plants.














Diagram by Anna Krajewski

We were looking at the "ABCDEE" (Abiotic, biotic, cycle, diversity, energy, evolution) of the pond. This would help us get a better idea of the health of the pond. One of the biggest aspects of a healthy pond is that it's very diverse in the life and different species that exists in it. We found a fair amount of different species, mostly being Copepod/Zoo plankton, they were very small and often there were too many to count, so we had to make a rough estimate. There were also other creatures such as stonefly nymphs, mayfly nymphs, water boatman flies, water pennies, leeches, and damselfly nymphs.

 Water Boatman Fly Photograph by Matilda Peng

 Turbidity was around 20 JTU, photograph by Matilda Peng

 Mayfly nymph, photograph by Lauren Ho 

 pH levels were always at 6-7, photograph by Matilda Peng

Although I was only there for one of the three data collection days due to personal reasons, what my group and I did (and what they did one the first two days without me) was measure the turbidity, pH, air & water temperature, phosphate levels and dissolved oxygen of the water in our part of the pond. We also looked for any living creatures we found in the water. What we did to do this was first collect all the tools we would be needing, which included a bucket, a large net, an open top container with separate compartments, a species identification sheet, and spoons and water droppers. Alan came along and stopped by with all the other tools we would need to measure the things listed above. We first filled the bucket with pond water, then used the net to stir up the dirt, leaves and other things at the bottom of the pond - back and forth five times - and then we scooped up a big netful and poured it into the bucket of pond water. From there, we used the spoons and our hands to sift through all the things that had come up with the net. We were looking for little creatures from the pond, and they were quite hard to spot and they were mostly black or dark coloured and blended in with the leaves. For this reason, we removed some of the larger leaves and sticks to help us more easily spot the critters. Any biotic creatures we found, we moved over to the separate compartment container and tried to identify them using the species identification sheet and magnifying glass. When we finished all of our data collection at the end of the class, we poured everything and all the creatures back into the pond. We then went back and inputted all of the data we collected into a master data sheet and a shared google document we were all contributors of.

 Bucket of clear water, emptying the net, water with biotic, Photographs by Lauren Ho


We were studying the pond to see whether it was healthy or unhealthy. The health of the pond has a direct relation to us and our life on campus. It plays an instrumental role in the overall health of our campus ecosystem, as well as the Merrimack river watershed, which the outflow leads to. I gained a better understanding of the ecosystem here at Proctor and the diversity of different creatures living specifically in the pond. I also gained a better understanding of how (the methods) to collect biotic and abiotic data, and I learned more about the campus ecosystem health - something very important to myself and all the students at Proctor as we spend most of our time during the school year living and attending class on campus. It's important for us to know about the environment we surround ourselves with.

I really enjoyed this project, because although I unfortunately missed two lessons/days of fieldwork and data collection, I was thankfully able to be present at the third day of data collection, and I had a lot of fun catching and separating the different species and identifying them using the magnifying glass and species identification sheet. I found it a little bit hard to catch up and get right back into things after having missed two classes, but I was grateful that Sydney and Matilda were patient with me and explained to me everything that I needed to know and that was going on. The data collection itself wasn't too hard, but understanding why we needed to know things like the purpose of 'dissolved oxygen' and 'nitrate levels' was confusing for me. Digging and sifting through the leaves and twigs in the pond to location and catch tiny creatures that camouflaged themselves in the leaves was a challenge, but I was patient and had fun doing it, even though it seemed like every time I got my capturing spoon under it, it would swim away incredibly quickly and hide itself somewhere else! I was excited for this project, because I gained a better understanding of the place that I live most of the year, where I spend a lot of time. Being able to know about the health of our ecosystem was really interesting for me. I'm excited for the future to become even more involved with the environment and interact more with it.