Facilities and Equipment

​Harbour Watch is based at Boyne Island Environmental Education Centre (BIEEC) and arrangements can be made to access BIEEC facilities. Harbour Watch has a range of industry quality scientific equipment available for students to use.

Equipment

Equipment is used as part of the Harbour Watch programs but is also able to be independently accessed by classroom teachers to use with their students. Teachers must complete a short equipment handling and operation session with the Harbour Watch project officer in order to ensure safe use and handling of equipment.

Students will have an opportunity to use a range of industry quality scientific equipment including:

• Quanta multi-probe data logger to test water quality (temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, salinity and total dissolved solids)
  


• Vernier lab quest data loggers and sensors—temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, salinity and conductivity.
  



• Mobile digital microscopes—which link to iPads— to investigate and classify aquatic macroinvertebrates.
  



• Field optical microscopes
  


• Spectrophotometer—nitrates, phosphates and heavy metals
  
• Handheld phosphorous checker—immediate in the fieldwork monitoring
• Kremmerer water sampler—sample at depth
• Benthic sampler—to sample substrate
• Plankton nets—to sample biological life in the water column
• Dip nets—to sample freshwater macroinvertebrates
• AquaFluor blue-green algae spectrophotometer
• Handheld GPS
• Secchi disks—to monitor turbidity.