This lab activity allows students to indetify macroinvertebrates and determine the health of an acquatic ecosystem.

Nitrate and phosphate are useful as fertilizers in agriculture and gardening. Nitrate and phosphate aid agricultural production by producing more abundant crops. However, since the mass production of ammonia during the 1940's by way of the Haber process, it has been noted that a phenomenon known as “nitrate pollution” may occur. This pollution can be demonstrated by conducting this simple experiment. This experiment demonstrates two main ideas. The first is a test of what levels of nitrate and phosphate allow for optimum algal growth. The second demonstrates at which levels of nitrate and phosphate algal blooms may occur, causing harm to an aquatic ecosystem (Freeman, 2002).

Geography 431 is designed to further understanding of the natural processes of aquatic ecosystems, management of water resources, and threats to sustaining water quantity. Develop awareness and appreciation of the perspectives about water as a precious resource, commodity, and sometimes hazard. Learn how and why water is distributed unevenly around the Earth. Examine how resource management decisions are strongly related to water availability, quantity, and quality. The course examines water resources management; dams and dam removal; provision of safe potable water; threats to water quantity and quality; land use changes; the water economy; water laws and policy; institutions for water management at the global, national, regional, and local scale; and issues of water security and climate change.

This activity is a longer project that involves using inquiry to find out what kinds of aquatic animals live in our school pond. Students use direct observation, journaling, outdoor classroom techniques, research skills, collaboration, and service learning to learn about their question.

In this field investigation, students will identify and determine the population size of snails in an aquatic environment.

This activity is a field study where students gather data on a stream based upon their protocol. They will correlate their data with another group and present their results to the class. They will develop and defend in class a new experimental question for a spring study.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Roundup is the most widely used non-selective herbicide, but it’s also one of the most controversial on the market. Much evidence about Roundup's safety is based on toxicity tests that, despite being outdated, are routinely used by regulators and say little about the long-term, sublethal effects of Roundup or its active ingredient glyphosate. Now, a new study has taken a systems biology approach to examine the effects of Roundup on organisms at at the genomic and fitness level. Daphnia are not a Roundup target but are exposed to the herbicide through run-off from farmlands and they are central to aquatic food webs. In the lab, Daphnia were exposed to the regulatory threshold concentration of glyphosate and Roundup. Researchers found that chronic exposure to either chemical had highly detrimental effects including embryonic developmental failure, DNA damage, and signaling interference. Daphnia also showed changes in their microbiome and disruptions in metabolism..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This activity is a field activity where students will perform various water quality tests to determine the types of organisms that live in a local pond and stream, and the characteristics that those aquatic environments seem to have that the organisms favor.