stream discharge
DESCRIPTION
for scienceTRANSCRIPT
Procedure:For the discharge of a stream you need to take 2 transects of the stream. You take the
average depth of the transect by taking a ruler and measuring the depth every 2 inches. Once you have all of the depth values you find an average value for those. Then you need to find the average velocity of the stream. You can take a tennis ball and put it about 10 feet upstream of the transect and see how long it takes it to travel those 10 feet. You do this 3 times and then take an average of those values. Then you need to find the width of the stream. You do that by taking a tape measure and have a person go into the river to get to the other side of the transect. Then you take the average values and you multiply them by each other. That will give you the stream discharge.
Analysys:We found that the streams discharge was roughly 27cfs. There were a couple things
wrong with the data. For one, there was one group that got a value much higher than all of the other groups. This was most likely due to a math error when calculating the stream discharge. The other was that a group also got a little bit lower than all of the other groups. Those 2 results are ⅓ of the data, and it doesn’t help when 33% of the data is altered. For the most part, the data seems accurate if you look at what the majority had.
Conclusion:We can accurately say that the stream has a good average discharge. We don’t want
the river to be too fast because that does not allow for the macroinvertebrates to have nice homes. The river is slow, which causes bends in the shape of the river. If the river were faster there would be straighter edges, and there would be less plantlife on the side of the rivers. This means that there would also be much more minerals and less turbidity in the river. If we can’t see into the river, than the sunlight isn’t going to do too well getting into the river either. That means that the plants that fish and small invertebrates need to survive underwater would not flourish as well as they do currently. The slow discharge of the river is creating a better habitat for life.