The Florida River Project: Using Watershed Monitoring to Teach Introductory Earth Systems Science

Our introductory courses have been redesigned to incorporate a group project monitoring a local river. The Florida River flows across every major geologic unit of SW Colorado between its headwaters in a wilderness area and its mouth in a region dominated by agriculture, natural gas development, and suburban homebuilding. The river is dammed, and its water is used by agriculture and the city of Durango. Both geology and land use are therefore important for the river's behavior and water chemistry, and their relative contributions are difficult to predict. We hope that this project will push students to think about fluvial processes, weathering, and groundwater flow, as well as about the impacts of humans on a watershed.

Preparation for the project includes a topographic maps lab, which uses maps of the watershed; two graphing exercises using previous years' data; and background research about the types of data the students will collect. During the data collection, each of six lab sections is assigned a reach along the river, and each section is divided into groups responsible for studying discharge, sediment load, and water chemistry. After collecting the data, each group presents its findings to the rest of the lab section, and compares its data to those collected along other reaches during the same week, and in other months at the same site. After a group discussion of the possible relationships between the discharge, sediment, and chemistry, and the relationships to geology and land use, each group writes a paper.

Student response during the pilot semester was mixed, ranging from “interesting – it was cool testing a local river and checking its quality” to “it was OK – kind of irrelevant.” Our future plans include incorporating discussion of the project into lectures and other labs, and emphasizing the project's relevance to local water issues.