pHighting Pollution to Save Dissolved Oxygen

Abstract

Our topic is dissolved oxygen content in different water environments. The broad concept of this study was to find out why there is less oxygen in some streams when compared to others, and what causes this problem. We tackled this by testing for different pH levels in water from three different sources and seeing if that affected the dissolved oxygen content. We found that, generally, in the samples with the less neutral pH levels, there also tended to be a lower concentration of dissolved oxygen. We hypothesized that different pH levels effect the dissolved oxygen in some streams because it kills algae that produce dissolved oxygen. We obtained our results by measuring the pH levels and dissolved oxygen with a pH probe and a dissolved oxygen probe.  Results show that the samples with a less neutral pH level tend to have lower dissolved oxygen content. This makes sense because the ideal pH levels for algae growth are from 6 to 8 (Sanco Industries).

Key terms: pH, Dissolved oxygen, Palmer Pollution Index, eutrophication.