Water quality of wetlands - Sengkang Floating Wetland

My name is J, and I am an undergraduate studying Environmental Studies in NUS. I will be starting on my honors thesis with my professor Dr. L this coming semester, and it is based on water quality monitoring at constructed wetlands-Sengkang Floatingwetland and Lorong Halus wetland. I have been reading your blog, and it has a lot of wonderful information very useful to me. I am still in the midst of my research before I start fieldwork, and I would like to ask you a few questions.

1. What are the parameters that you have measured in these wetlands before, and is it possible for me to obtain the data of these parameters? Considering the fact that I will be conducting some tests, a comparison with previous records of your data would be very useful.

2. Also, have you done a dissolved carbon analysis of the waters in Singapore/pCO2 analysis?

Thank you very much Sir!

Regards,

J


Hi J,

Glad that you like my posts. And I am happy to see that you are doing some field work at Sengkang Floating Wetland and Lorong Halus Wetland. I feel that not enough is being done to monitor the water quality in our water bodies.

1) I have not done any monitoring at Lorong Halus.

As for Sengkang Floating Wetland, I have conducted a workshop for teachers (1, 2) there in collaboration with PUB. No data was officially documented as that was a training workshop rather than a scientific monitoring session. But I have dug up a photo of the white board when the participants presented their results. See if you can make sense of it.

Figure: Results of water quality monitoring workshop at Sengkang Floating Wetland (11 Nov 2011)

 

 

2) No, I have not a dissolved carbon/ pCO2 analysis. My choice of parameters in water bodies is determined more by the demands of a healthy ecology. (Naturally, if I am working with drinking water or wastewater, the demands and thus parameters will be different.) In my opinion, dissolved carbon/ pCO2 are indirect parameters when it comes to water ecology as they reflect the interactions of water and geology more.  There are already so many parameters to monitor. No need to complicate matters or use up more resources unnecessarily :-)

 

Good luck!