It’s hardly headline news whenever ecologists and loggers find themselves locked into a war of words over the future of an area of forestry. But rather than the often heard arguments about the destruction of precious ecosystems and wildlife habitat, a contentious battle currently raging in Alberta is focused heavily on water quality.

Following the issue of a license to clear-cut an area of prime forest in the protected Castle River area in the Canadian Rockies, protestors have been campaigning to halt the logging.

According to University of Alberta professor of ecology David Schindler, the Castle watersheds “generate most of the water for the Old Man System” which provides the drinking water for such southern Albertan cities as Lethbridge. Schindler says, “You start messing around, logging them, you’re likely to invite high turbidity… due to erosion”. Read More...

Tags: Castle river, Canadian Rockies, water quality monitoring, Alberta Environment and Water, Castle watershed, University of Alberta

Our waterways are important for so many reasons. We rely on them as sources of drinking water, for recreation and agriculture, and they are an essential ecosystem supporting countless organisms from plants to fish to large mammals.

Water pollution has long been a serious issue, and all kinds of contaminants can find their way into our streams, rivers and lakes. Among these sources, construction and the effects of stormwater run-off from operating sites are of significant concern. Read More...

Tags: EPA, stormwater, sediment, pollution, Clean Water Act

Stormwater runoff is a major source of pollution of our waterways, an issue of particular importance here on the North American West Coast. Check out this video depicting the effects of stormwater runoff in the Seattle area...it’s fascinating, scary, and unbelievable at the same time:

Tags: stormwater, water quality, pollution, Puget Sound

Our successful DTS-12 Annual Maintenance and Service program has been automated to make it easier to keep your DTS-12 turbidity sensor extremely accurate and insure long-term maintenance-free deployment. A new online service order form collects all the information we need to start the process, and we've streamlined the process to make it hassle-free for you.

Your annual maintenance includes an additional full year of warranty for all parts and labor (including calibration). So not only do you minimize the chance of any interruption in the collection of data, you gain the comfort of knowing that even if a problem arises it will be dealt with expediently and at no cost to you. If you count on continuous instream turbidity monitoring, an annual re-calibration and servicing is a must. It's like getting a brand new turbidity sensor!

Head over to the Support page to learn more about the DTS-12 Annual Maintenance and Service program.

Tags: dts-12, Maintenance, turbidity, Service

Here is a shocking example of the lack of stewardship that we as humans have for the environment. Although this video is a few years old, it still speaks to the extensive effects of pollution as a result of human activities.

Tags: pollution, Garbage patch

The environmental challenges that face us today are very different from the ones we faced 40 years ago. Throughout the 1950-70s, corporate expansion and rapid technological advancement had us driving our big cars from our big cities to our big factories. With cars and factories spewing thick black smoke into the air, and waste and sewage from cities dumped into lakes and rivers, nobody seemed to care about the long-term effects of these activities. It seemed like an environmental race to the bottom, and the reality was that much of the groundwater sources, watersheds, and consequently our drinking water, were slowly becoming more and more contaminated. Read More...

Tags: turbidity, pollution, automated grab sampling, water quality, monitoring

We are pleased to announce that the USGS Hydrologic Instrumentation Facility (HIF) now carries the DTS-12 turbidity sensor as a standard inventoried product. This means that any USGS customers can now purchase the DTS-12 directly from the HIF at HIF pricing and receive support from the HIF as well as FTS. The DTS-12 is the World’s Best Instream Turbidity Sensor and has been a runaway success for over eight years. Read More...

Tags: dts-12, HIF

Turbidity is the cloudiness of a liquid and is one of the key indicators of water quality. It is caused by suspended particulates, such as silt, algae, organic and inorganic chemicals including fertilizers, and microscopic organisms like bacteria. As a result, the water’s murkiness, or the degree of turbidity, depends on the concentration of the suspended particulates. Read More...

Tags: turbidity, dts-12, sediment, suspended sediment, TMDLs, pollution