Project CLEAR: February 2011

What is Project Clear

Project CLEAR (Candlewood Lake Environmental Awareness and Responsibility) got its start in 2001 and has grown into an educational program that is now offered annually to approximately 125 high school students from Bethel, Brookfield, Danbury, New Fairfield and New Milford and Sherman.

Prior to doing their field studies in late June, students spend four days throughout the school year in a classroom setting at Western Connecticut State University learning about different scientific topics pertaining to Candlewood Lake in order to help prepare them for their June field work. Project CLEAR students have traditionally also volunteered their time on Candlewood Lake Cleanup Day.
After the end of the school year in June, students spend four days doing field investigations on and around Candlewood Lake, followed by one day of preparation for their presentations to the public that evening. For the field study portion of the program students are split into the following groups: lake water quality (phytoplankton, nutrients, dissolved oxygen), stream water quality, aquatic invasive plants, residential lake shoreline study, fisheries, forestry, terrestrial invasives and dragonfly studies as well as a documentary group.
At the conclusion of the program's field days the students spend the last day of Project CLEAR preparing to host a presentation session which is open to the public. At the evening's events the public viewed a first cut of the video on this page, which was filmed and edited by the Project CLEAR documentary group. They were then invited to an open presentation session where they could walk around to the different groups and were able to speak with the students about their studies on Candlewood Lake.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Plankton Collections for 2009

Plankton was collected from 3 sites located at Candlewood Lake in the towns of Danbury, New Fairfield and New Milford.
At each location they collected 3 samples from a variety of depths within the photic zone. After filtering each sample and counting the total number of organisms per ml. they compared the three locations. New Fairfield had a total count of 6.533 organisms, New Milford 5.920 and Danbury with a total of 4.066. See graph.
The differences between sites were not significant.