Water and Environment

The Opportunity

This lab studies the environment by measuring it: water quality, ecosystem health, pollution, and the condition of habitat. You choose a question, design a study that can answer it, and say what the numbers do and do not show.

Some of that measurement you make yourself, at a site you can get to. Some of it has already been made: agencies and volunteers have been sampling streams, air and habitat for decades, and the records are public. Both are real research here, and a project can run on either or on both.

What the two have in common is a documented record to work against. A reading you take at a stream can be set beside thirty years of readings from the same watershed, and a question you ask of an archive can be checked against a measurement you make yourself.

Water and Environment is one of the SoTS Research Labs, which follow the same methodology and format: see Princeton Labs for how semesters work and expectations from students participating in the program.

Field Sites

For students who work in person, two conservation sites within about twenty minutes of Princeton are open to the public and run their own research programs.

The Watershed Institute

• 950 acres preserved at the Watershed Reserve, in the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed
• Volunteers have assessed water quality here since 1992 through StreamWatch, testing phosphorus, nitrates, dissolved oxygen, bacteria, pH, temperature, turbidity and aquatic life. Results from 2020 to 2024 rate each site Excellent, Good, Fair or Poor on every parameter
• StreamWatch publishes its methods and data quality documentation, and takes volunteers on a one-year commitment

Duke Farms

• 2,700 acres of publicly accessible conservation land with active ecological research
• Bioacoustic recorders capture bird, bat and insect populations across habitats, and camera traps document species presence
• Meadow, forest and wetland restoration projects with documented outcomes

The Archives

For students at a distance, and for anyone whose question reaches further back than one semester of sampling, the monitoring record is public. Among the archives this lab works from:

• USGS Water Data for the Nation: continuous and daily data, field measurements and discrete samples from monitoring locations across the United States, searchable by location or political boundary.
• Water Quality Portal: discrete water-quality data pooled from the USGS, the EPA and over 400 state, federal, tribal and local agencies.
• EPA AirData: air quality measured at outdoor monitors across the US, downloadable as datasets and reports.
• NOAA NCEI: the national climate and environmental record, including the monthly US and global temperature series.
• GBIF and iNaturalist: species occurrence records, the first an international network of open biodiversity data, the second a community of observers whose research-grade observations feed into it.
• StreamWatch: the Stony Brook-Millstone assessments above, with the methods and data-quality documents behind them.

The Competition Pathway

A finished project can be entered for the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, a water research competition for high school students that runs from state level to a US national round and then to an international final in Stockholm.

Prerequisites

Open to high school, middle school, and home school students curious about environmental issues. No prior research experience is required, and neither is living near a field site.

Enrollment and Tuition