Six Mile Creek runs to the north of the Ithaca College campus and is the source of water for the City of Ithaca. We are trying to answer two questions: 1) is the reservoir used by the city susceptible to harmful algal blooms (HABs)?; and 2) what is the source of dissolved manganese that can affect the quality of the water? My students and I are working with the Ithaca City Water Treatment Plant and Prof. Matthew Reid of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Cornell to address these questions. In Fall 2020 we began preliminary sampling of groundwater in the watershed and in Spring 2021 we will begin full-scale sampling and analysis.
