Reflections by Rachel Loke, Samyata, Felina and Ferozia

Rise and shine for our first day in Flatford Studies Council (FSC)! After a few hours of theory session, we set off to a rural area to take measurements for our river studies. We were split up into groups of 4 and allocated to different sites of River Brett.

My group consisted of Samyata, Felina, Ferozia and Rachel Loke. We were doing our research at Cherryhill. We took measurements like the width, depth, wetted perimeter, velocity of the water and the bedload size of the river.

We had some difficulties measuring the width as the measurement tape kept getting pulled by the water, and we spent some time ensuring that the tape was taut. It was also hard as there were many vegetation at the banks of the river so we could not measure accurately from one end to the other.

The depth was much more tedious to measure as we had to pick out 5 points with equal intervals. Since our measuring tape moved a lot by the currents of the water, we had difficulties attaining accurate results.

Measuring the velocity of the water was the most interesting measurement as we had to use an instrument called a hydropop to measure it. We have never heard of such an instrument before and we were quite excited to experiment. At some parts of the river, especially at the sides nearer to the banks, we could not get the propeller spinning, so we assumed that there is zero velocity.

Measuring the bedload size was tedious too as the rocks that we picked out was of all sorts of sizes. Furthermore, the vernier caliper that we were using were slightly different from the ones we used in school. We kept dropping the rocks as it was cold and windy and our hands were numb! So we spent the longest time measuring the length of the bedload.

On the whole, today was a very fun and enriching day as we would never get the chance to do river studies in Singapore, with all the hands on experiences here. :)