Human Impact on Watersheds Digital Museum

This webpage discusses Project Butterfly, a partnership to clean up the rivers in Nairobi, Kenya. The information shows that for many cities, there is not a system to dispose of garbage, so people have nowhere to throw their trash besides in the river. This project brings together people from the community to work with government and business to clean up the community and the streams. This project creates incentives for people to collect trash instead of throwing it into the river. If the trash is in a container, the runoff won't carry trash into the river and into the ocean to cause additional damage downstream.

  In this video , an educator from the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds tells about plastic pollution and ways that the products we use end up out in the sea. She shows us the impact of  the choices we make when we use everyday products such as water bottles, straws, or even small plastic bottle caps. If we  wash  any of these plastic items into the watershed, they can end up harming and killing sea birds. The educator in this video shows pictures from an operation to remove a plastic straw from the digestive system of a seabird, and we even get to meet a penguin. The  Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds is an international body that has been rescuing sea birds since 1968 ( https://sanccob.co.za/ ). These disturbing pictures are important for us to see because the choices that humans make about throwing trash away carelessly can prove to be lethal for creatures who have to swim in our human poll...

Emily Penn is a sailor with eXXpedition and an explorer who has a specialty of studying plastic and has the goal of cleaning up the oceans. In this interview , she tells about the damage that plastic can do because humans do not handle it the right way.  She talks about how the way we design products is wrong. For example, she shows how we use each  plastic grocery bag just once or twice, but the plastic material is designed to last forever. Recycling does not process every type of plastic. Many plastics get discarded carelessly and work their way from our storm drains to the ocean. Eventually, the plastics float to the center of the ocean in a big spinning gyre that is generated by the turning of the Earth.

Water is the most important aspect for life on Earth.  This video from NASA describes the Earth's Water Cycle. NASA satellites can measure the availability and distribution of water in the ocean, on land, and in the atmosphere. The NASA images illustrate the closed system of the supply of water around the planet -- all the water exists somewhere, and it's either frozen, floating in the air, or in a liquid form. Seeing the whole scope of this global system emphasizes the importance of taking care of the water that we have.

This is a fun music video from GoNoodle about the water cycle, featuring Blazer Fresh. The Blazer Fresh group dances and sings to break down the features of the water cycle.  This song strings together our vocabulary from the class discussion:  precipitation,  accumulation,  evaporation,  transpiration,  condensation. The song helps to remind me how each of the stages flows into the next one to create the entire water cycle.  Get up and get moving while learning all about the water cycle! 

In this video you will learn about how water flows to and from various surfaces in the Plaster Creek watershed in Kent County, Michigan. Storm water runoff carries pollutants, like road chemicals, fertilizers, or sediments that it gathers as it flows through storm drains and soil. These pollutants can cause damage to the ecosystems of the neighboring rivers, creeks, and watersheds.  This video is a perfect example at a local level of the movement of water across the land. It's like a big broom that carries away things from our parking lots and parks and yards to end up flowing in the water. When there is a flood the effect can be great on the land, but also in the rivers and oceans.