McCall Outdoor Science School

The mission of the University of Idaho McCall Outdoor Science School is to work toward reciprocal relationships among land, water, and people through transformative research and learning experiences. In week-long residential and outreach programs 5th-12th grade students from across Idaho engage in inquiry-based and hands-on observation of the natural world in Ponderosa State Park. The grant will provide Vernier equipment to support the outreach and residential environmental education program participants in collecting water quality data in west-central Idaho and help populate the IdaH20 community science database. With this equipment water quality measurements will be taken  of Payette Lake, the North Fork of the Payette River, and their smaller tributaries to better understand how human and ecological forcing affect the local watershed. Students will then upload their data into the IdaH20 database to add to the community science project of monitoring water quality across Idaho for managers and researchers to access. Students will download and visualize data from across the Payette watershed and other watersheds in Idaho to better contextualize the data they collect during their program and compare their data to historical trends.