The Maori view of rivers
reflects the dynamic vitality, the essential importance of fresh
water. Looking after rivers is in everyone's interest, and the
activities involved in being kind to rivers are healthy, educational,
and uplifting.
Seakeepers offers these
resources on River Keeping (River Care, Stream Watching, Adopting
a River) to schools and communities
so they can get with the programme and spend some enjoyable days
in the company of New Zealand rivers, streams, estuaries, and
wetlands.
At the heart of a River
Keeping project is the nucleus of people who organise
and maintain the community surveying programme.
Motivation is critical here, and must stem from a very basic understanding:
Rivers are a part
of our extended being. Fresh water flows through us, the landscape,
and all creatures in the air, on the earth, and in the water.
Water is the medium of life. When it is fouled, so are the relationships
between all creatures within its domain.
Establishing
a Baseline
You will all have heard
older people say such things as :
"I remember the days when:
----- there were many more fish around
----- you could always catch a large snapper
----- we used to net white bait by the bucketful
----- the summers were always cooler
----- the rivers were much cleaner."
Often little notice is taken of the claims because there is no hard evidence - or data.
Starting a BASELINE
study is therefore extremely valuable because it is a disciplined
way of recording hard information (or real facts) against which
future changes can be measured.
If in the future you
want to present a submission about the state of the water in your
local river to the local council, a commercial business, or the
local dairy farmers cooperative, making a claim that their activities
were spoiling the river, you will then have hard facts to back
up your claim.
If you found that water
quality had improved as a result of action that your school or
community group had taken, you would be able to prove that too.
You good result could them be used to encourage other groups,
seek support for further projects, expand your existing programme.
Setting up and keeping
a baseline involves being well organised and keeping good records
of the information that you collect.
Ideally the records
should be kept on computer spreadsheets or data bases.
Always keep a back-up
file of your data base in case the master file becomes accidentally
deleted or altered when students are working with it or adding
new information to it.
Keeping a database makes
teaching easy! It is the discipline and the basis of the organisation
behind a full teaching programme that can be run each year.
However it is not just
a repetition of the previous year's exercise. Some information
collection methods might need to be modified as a result identifying
long term changes. Some new information may need collecting. Your
programme will need to have a solid base but have the flexibility
to be dynamic.
What
Tests and Topics to Tackle
Water quality and the
health of a stream can be studied by classes of any age. The basics
of the various topics involved, set out below give the overall
picture but investigating all of the topics may not be appropriate
for all ages or abilities.
It is most important
only to tackle the parts that you and your class can do easily
and safely. Every exercise you tackle should be interesting and
or fun.
Even the youngest can
** observe ** make comments and word descriptions ** paint pictures
of what they saw ** smell the water, ** net and filter creatures
from it ** keep a list of birds that they saw ** collect pond
weeds for class aquarium.
These exercises raise
awareness of the natural world around them, engender sympathy
for freshwater life and a clean environment and form the basis
for more advanced studies when they are older.
