I am bachelors in Forestry Student at Institute of Forestry (IOF), Nepal. In this report, I am sharing an Aquatic survey that we (Batch mate) had done last week during our field- excursion. We had started our short trek from IOF to Sidane, Pokhara and finally done our survey in many fresh water bodies over there. We are total forty in number and the number is further divided into four group.

Luckily, I had got the chance to represent the one group. We had performed the survey in four different aquatic habitat. The main objective of this survey was:

1. To access the anthropogenic threats and the contemporary Pollution status of the Aquatic flora and Fauna (Plants, reptiles, amphibians and some mammals that frequently visit the source for water intake).

2. To access the water depth and water temperature in various points.

3. To access the amount of sunlight that the water source received.

4.  To know the influence of Invasive plants (Plants not native to the original place and tendency to spread very fast which hampers the environment) over there.

Methods:

We had used long stick to observe the depth of the water and later on, we measured the actual depth that the stick was dipped by using the measuring tape. For accessing the anthropogenic threats and pollution status, we carefully observed all the necessary objects like: Human activities (fishing, bathing, washing, stone and sand extraction), developmental activities (constructing bridge) and plastics proportion. We had used manual method to know the water temperature i.e. we plunged our hands to roughly analyze the temperature. We observed the quantity of shade to access the amount of sunlight. We also identified many invasive plants over there.

Outcome

The outcome of this particular survey will be hand over to the Department of Wildlife, IOF. From our result, we also concluded the overall status of the Aquatic Ecosystem that our group had surveyed was satisfactory.