Geography K–10 · Years 7–8

Waterwatch water quality testing of a local waterway

Water in the world (ACARA Year 7 sub-strand); NSW Stage 4 focus area Water in the World (2015 syllabus) and Water in the world (2024 syllabus)

PracticalMedium risk

School laboratory, not for home

In a school laboratory, with a teacher supervising, under the school's risk assessment. Not for home.

The idea

The health of a waterway is measured by a fixed set of physical and chemical readings plus the animals living in it, compared against published guideline ranges.

Safety card

Medium riskA teacher supervises

Setting: In a school laboratory, with a teacher supervising, under the school's risk assessment. Not for home.

Hazards

water edge and slips
water-borne pathogens

Controls

sites chosen with safe bank access; adult ratio per excursion policy
gloves and hand-washing; no sampling within days of sewage overflow warnings
the kit's chemical dissolved oxygen reagents are not opened or used; if a borrowed kit contains them they stay sealed in the kit and go back with it

Note

The chemical dissolved oxygen test is not performed. The NSW Waterwatch SMART 2 kit procedure fixes the sample with Reagent No. 2, alkaline potassium iodide azide, and sodium azide appears in Appendix H, Chemicals which are banned from government schools, of the NSW Department of Education Chemical Safety in Schools package, which states that the use of those chemicals is banned in schools by staff and students. Dissolved oxygen is therefore read with a meter or not at all. The remaining readings use no scheduled chemical; record the practical in RiskAssess (riskassess.com.au) and use the WHS risk assessment template that Waterwatch NSW publishes with its testing procedures.

What you need

Waterwatch kit (borrowed from the regional Waterwatch coordinator or the school's own): thermometer, a pH meter or narrow-range pH strips stepped at 0.2 to 0.3 of a unit, electrical conductivity meter, turbidity tube, and a dissolved oxygen meter where the kit has one. Broad-range pH strips step half a unit or more and cannot place a sample on the correct side of the score card's 7.8 or 8.6 boundaries: record the resolution printed on the packet or the meter's manual, and where only broad-range strips are available report pH to that resolution and mark its score as uncertain rather than read off the card.
2 sample buckets, the Waterwatch kit's fine-mesh dip net, white sorting tray, ice-cube trays, hand lenses, macroinvertebrate identification chart
Recording sheet with the Catchment Health Indicator Program score card published in the ACT Waterwatch secondary resource (values tailored to the Upper Murrumbidgee and Greater Canberra region): pH 6.6–7.8 excellent, below 5.4 or above 8.6 degraded; EC ≤ 98 µS/cm excellent, above 404 degraded; turbidity ≤ 10 NTU excellent, above 90 degraded; dissolved oxygen 88–99 % saturation excellent, below 78 % or above 115 % degraded. A school in another region uses its regional Waterwatch ranges where they are published.
Gloves, hand sanitiser, gumboots

How to do it

Choose an upstream site and a downstream site (for example above and below a stormwater outlet). Photograph each site and note weather and recent rain.
Collect water in the bucket facing upstream, 20 cm below the surface where depth allows, from the bank or from water no deeper than gumboot height.
Read the water temperature in the stream, with the thermometer held in the water for one minute. Then, from the bucket, pH, EC (rinse the probe in the sample first) and turbidity (fill the tube until the black-and-white disc at the base just disappears, read the NTU scale).
Where the kit has a dissolved oxygen meter, rinse its probe and lower it into flowing water from the bank, read mg/L once the value settles and record the mg/L with the water temperature. The saturation concentration depends on barometric pressure, and so on altitude, and on salinity as well as on temperature, so a table indexed on temperature alone shifts the percentage by several points: record the site's elevation and the day's barometric pressure beside the reading, convert with the kit's table, and mark any percentage within a few points of the 78 % or 115 % boundaries as uncertain rather than scored. The score card adopted here was drawn up for the Upper Murrumbidgee and Greater Canberra region, which lies well above sea level, so its bands carry that region's pressure and not a coastal school's. Where there is no meter, dissolved oxygen is recorded as not measured and its row on the score card is left blank: the chemical dissolved oxygen test in the NSW Waterwatch SMART 2 kit fixes the sample with alkaline potassium iodide azide, and sodium azide is banned from NSW government schools, so that test is not run.
Sweep the net through edge vegetation and riffles for 2 minutes, from the bank or ankle-deep water; tip into the tray, sort into ice-cube trays, identify to the chart's groups and count sensitive, tolerant and very tolerant groups.
Score each reading against the score card and write an overall rating for each site; propose one management action for the downstream site aimed at its lowest-scoring reading; share the results with the regional Waterwatch coordinator if the school takes part in the program.

What you should see

Two parameter sheets with units (°C, pH, µS/cm, NTU, and mg/L with % saturation where a dissolved oxygen meter is available) and a macroinvertebrate tally. Below an urban outlet the downstream site may show higher turbidity and EC and fewer sensitive groups than the upstream site; whether it does at the chosen creek is the finding. Readings are compared with the ranges on the sheet, so the rating is a lookup rather than an opinion, with two limits stated on the sheet itself: a reading whose instrument cannot resolve the band edge, and a dissolved oxygen percentage close to a boundary, are recorded as uncertain instead of scored. It worked if each reading was taken from a fresh sample, the probe was rinsed between sites, and any parameter the kit could not measure is shown as not measured rather than left to read as a zero.

What changes

What you change: site (upstream, downstream)
What you measure: each water quality parameter and sensitive-group count
What you keep the same: same day and time
same sampling depth and method
same kit and calibration

Common misconceptions

Each of these ideas is wrong, and the activity is a chance to test it.

Clear water is clean water.
A single reading on one day describes a waterway.

Curriculum references

The NSW syllabus outcomes and Australian Curriculum v9 codes this activity supports. They are references, not a verified or complete curriculum alignment.

Geography K–10 Syllabus (2015), NESA; current and taught in 2026, replaced from 2027. The outcome codes are not printed on the NESA landing page for this syllabus, which only links the document, so the url given is the syllabus document itself (geography-k-10-syllabus-2015.docx); the code and its outcome text were read in that document on 23 September 2026.GE4-5 GE4-7
Geography 7–10 Syllabus (2024), NESA; implementation from 2027, not yet taught; code read on this page on 22 September 2026GE4-MAN-01 GE4-TAP-01
Australian Curriculum v9AC9HG7K02AC9HG7S02AC9HG7S05

Sources

The pages the author read to write this activity.

All Concept Studio activities