Student Research Reports

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Hydrological measurements are important, because they help us understand the climate and analyze everything around water bodies (Mander et al., 2014; Ott et al., 2020). We were interested in how water bodies' hydrological parameters differ from each other and wanted to explore and analyze the hydrochemistry of water bodies. We studied 3 different research locations near Varemurru Holiday Village, Pärnumaa, Estonia. Two of the research locations were bio-ponds (one natural bio-pond and one artificial bio-pond), the third research location was the Baltic Sea. Our hypotheses were: High amounts of nitrates are in the actively used bio-pond. The amount of dissolved oxygen decreases with the increase of temperature. Seawater has a higher electrical conductivity than the water in the bio-ponds. Water alkalinity decreases with the decrease of the water pH level. Water transparency is better in the sea than in the artificial bio-ponds. We used different tools to analyze the water bodies’ parameters. The parameters we analyzed were water temperature, amount of dissolved oxygen, conductivity, pH value, alkalinity, the amount of nitrates, and transparency. The results showed that one of our hypotheses were supported and four were partially supported. The bio-ponds and the Baltic Sea have quite different hydrochemistry. The biggest surprises were in the dissolved oxygen amount and in the electrical conductivity of the water bodies. In the future it would be interesting to analyze the same water bodies in different seasons to see if and how much the bio-ponds’ and the sea’s hydrochemistry changes over the year. How do they change compared to themselves and each other, do the differences between water bodies’ hydrochemistry become bigger or smaller?