Being a geographer for the day

Year 9 become geographers for a day in a Riverfly trip to Stanborough Lakes

On Friday 8th November, we went to Stanborough Lakes to experience what a Geographer does while experimenting. Whilst at the River Lea, we went through a risk assessment to make sure everyone was aware and safe just in case something happened, even though it was very unlikely to occur. The risk assessment included making sure we would be safe by the water and making sure we did not catch Weil’s disease! We sketched out our surroundings and labelled our diagram with the proper geographical names.

(see below some pictures of our sketches and experiments)

When we went into the water, we found a large miller’s fish.

In the river, we used a net to get the river flies from the water by kicking the riverbed for 1 minute. Then we tipped them into the water tray. We searched the water for different river flies.

There weren’t really many of them. We found only one mayfly, a caseless caddisfly, a cased caddisfly and a freshwater shrimp. We worked out the depth using the nets we used for the kick sampling. The nets had measurements. We had to have a measuring tape in order to measure the width of the lake. This helped because we could then see how man made the lake was, as well as the fact that the current kept on sweeping away the tape; luckily, the tape was being held! The way we tested for the current velocity was by putting a cork in the water and seeing how fast it could travel 5 meters.

We learnt that unfortunately the River Lea was not very healthy. We know this because when we did the experiment, we could not find many invertebrates. These are highly sensitive to pollution and therefore the River Lea must have been polluted. We decided this might be because of the main roads and train track nearby. Also this may be due to the amount of rain we have had over the past few days, resulting in everything being pushed down the drains into the river, causing all pollution to swim into the river.

[NB: more illustration pictures to be uploaded once this post has been approved