World Water Monitoring Challenge
Measure your own water quality
Water is essential to life. The WWMC invites citizens around the world to take a critical look at water, and at how their behavior influences the health of water.
World Water Monitoring Challenge™ is an international education and outreach program that builds public awareness and involvement in protecting water resources around the world by engaging citizens to conduct basic monitoring of their local water bodies.
Traditionally taking place in the last weeks of September, the citizen science NETLAKE project would like to seize this moment to engage citizens throughout Europe to take simple measurements on water quality in lakes and ponds nearby their homes.
The NETLAKE Citizen Science project is nested under EU COST Action NETLAKE (Networking Lake Observatories in Europe, ES 1201).
NETLAKE aims to build a network of sites and individuals to support the development and deployment of sensor-based systems in lakes and reservoirs, and promote their use to address both current and future water quality issues in Europe.
Want to participate in the NETLAKE World Water Monitoring Challenge?
Water clarity is critical for the health of a water system. We would like to invite you to measure two aspects of water clarity: transparency and colour.
Transparency
You can measure the transparency of the water with a simple device called a Secchi-disc.
It's a circular disc attached to a string or pole, which can be easily constructed from any old cd or dvd.
Slowly lower the disc in the water. The depth at which it is no longer visible will serve as a measure of the water's transparency.
Colour
Another aspect of water clarity is the colour of the water. This may be measured using the Forel-Ule scale.
The Forel-Ule Scale is a colour scale which helps you identify how productive your water is. It is used in conjunction with the Secchi-disc, by comparing the colour of the water at half the Secchi-depth with the Forel-Ule colour palette.
How water wise are you?
We would also like to know how much you know about water, so please fill in this online survey.
The results of the survey will allow us to see how aware people are about water and how we can better protect our precious waters.
