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Jordan P. Meriwether

          Hello, my name is Jordan Prince Meriwether. I am a Senior student at Science Leadership Academy, and hope to get involved in Environmental Science as a career. Throughout my final school year I was given a project known as a Capstone. This Project is meant to reflect both myself and the core values of my school, them being inquiry,  research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. For me this was understanding the environment, and in particular water quality. I wanted to understand how we could tell there a variance in water quality without using subjective methods such as pH kits. In the end, I discovered that through the use of microorganisms it could be better indicated, and with more refining I decided to study diatoms and see how they would react in varying environments based on pH. This website contains the results of my studies and research. My findings will detail diatoms, my project’s process, and my findings. I hope you enjoy what I found and grow off of my discoveries.

Basic Information on
Diatoms
Proccess for
Studying

Parts of Project

Results and Conclusion
of Study

Overview of Work:

          What indicates water quality to you? Perhaps it is the ability to ingest large quantities of water without any deadly side effects. Maybe it is having a pH between 6 and an 8. Or mayhaps it is the ability to see through the liquid without any haze. Whatever you feel, we can all agree that clean water is important and when it comes to understanding it we need to be accurate. Circumstance has allowed me the chance to look deeper into this inquiry. I wanted to develop the foundation on which there would be a method of understanding water quality. My thinking was that the best way to indicate the quality of the water was to look at the organisms that lived inside. I decided to do this through comparing microorganisms known as diatoms in many different pH environments. Why Diatoms? Due to their abundance and variance in both tolerance and build, it would be possible to both find them and notice there diversity in different environments. As well the choice of diatoms allowed a good limit on what I had to keep note on. Throughout this project I would travel between different rivers taking biofilm samples and analysing them through a microscope. I hoped to find correlation between pH and diatoms development. In the end, I did find much to note.

          We are living on a polluted planet. Places like Flint, Michigan and Ranipet, India have to take emmese precautions about how drink the water in their own towns, and while it was obvious in Ranipet, from the pain, Flint could not tell until after the damage was done. With the addition of certainty in water quality we begin to see how these types of events stop happening.  We need to move past the days of guessing the color of a pH strip and moving the direction of understanding how the water effects itself. My findings will show shed light on water quality. Mayhaps even you the viewer will build off the finding I obtain.

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