Student buoy project keeps Beaufort River data collection afloat

While their classmates begin their weekends, five Beaufort High School students volunteer most Friday afternoons to collect data from the Beaufort River.

Led by chemistry teacher Kinsler Mack, the group claims to be the first Basic Observation Buoy Club in the United States.

"It's fun," said student Brittany Baker. "We're monitoring the changes in our environment."

The club began last year after Mack attended a conference and received the instruments and equipment needed to build a buoy -- worth about $1,000 -- from the Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence, an organization that encourages collaboration between scientists and college and high school educators.

The organization wanted to experiment with using the buoys to gather data in inner coastal areas. It allowed Beaufort High to pioneer the project at the high school level, Mack said.

"We live in coastal communities, so water quality is essential to the environment we live in," Mack said. "For these students, being interested in that is almost a natural thing."

Since April 2009, the club has collected eight weeks of data from the river.

The buoy is launched from Port Royal Landing Marina on a Friday and retrieved the following Friday. It is then returned to the classroom for a week to allow its batteries to recharge.

The buoy records pH levels, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, water temperature and air temperature every hour. Students are experimenting with additional equipment to compile other data, including rainfall amounts.

The Beaufort River is unusual because ocean water flows through it from both sides of the waterway, student Harley Martin said.

"It's a unique estuary," he said, "and finding data on it that no one else really has is interesting."

While the science is fascinating, there's one more thing the students like about the project -- the control they have over the work.

Mack said he expects students to work out problems on their own.

"I'm not going to tell them what to do or how to do it," he said. "They make mistakes, and I kind of laugh at them but just let them go."

Student Ashton Wheeler said club members feel a sense of ownership for the project because they're allowed to test their own ideas.

"It's been a lot of hard work but also a lot of fun," she said. "Last year, when we started, we were all so new at it, we kept messing up things.

"But now we've got it all down."