Mount Saint Mary College Biology students put on their waders and worked alongside students from Newburgh’s San Miguel Academy recently, researching the Hudson River during Hudson River Snapshot Day.
Mount students – hailing from the classes of associate Biology professors Suparna Bhalla and Elizabeth Harper – demonstrated experiments like identifying fish species from net samples, checking the oxygen percentage of the water, measuring the wind speed, and sampling the soil from the Hudson River.
Snapshot Day is an annual event that celebrates the Hudson River Estuary while educating participants from middle school through college. Part of National Estuaries Week, the event is coordinated by The Hudson River Estuary Program of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Each fall, environmental education centers team up with students along the Hudson River to create a day-in-the-life picture of the river from the Troy Dam to New York Harbor. Snapshot Day began in 2003 with 300 student participants and has grown to involve more than 5,000 students and individual participants, from about 90 sites from the New York Bight up to Peebles Island on the Hudson River, and into the Mohawk watershed, a major Hudson River tributary. Each site gathers data on the Hudson and shares their results, gaining a better understanding of this historic and vital estuary system as they build data literacy.