The sounds of soils

 The sounds of soils. (BBC News)

Do you know where you're at?

 Jason Kottke posted recently on knowing more about where you are at. As he acknowledges, it isn't a new idea. 

But, if you want to answer it, could you? Do you have the resources to look up the soil where you are? To map the water movement around you? What resources would you need?

 

Water quality

Water quantity is easy to monitor with river gauges. The USGS has plenty of these online.

But how do we know about water quality? Water quality monitoring is work and this resource from Hudson River Park gives some insight. After explaining the work it also reports that "Hudson River Park’s water quality supported indirect contact for recreation 286 out of the past 366 days."

But for a large watershed, it might not just be a single point or a single level of accomplishment. Massachusetts's Charles River Watershed Association uses a report card system for reporting on 39 sampling sites throughout their watershed. 

Since it is continuously changing, Orange County, Florida maintains a Water Quality Dashboard. An amazing interface, but not something that every community has enough data to populate.

Creating a base

While we are talking in class about creating base maps, it might be worth checking out the great work done by the Environmental Modeling Center at UPenn. The base datum created with UAV mapping for the Galapagos is both award-winning and amazing. Some fun toys too.