The YEE office recently went on an expedition 35km north of our comfortable office. We arrived at our destination, the misty and beautiful hill-town of Mělník and a 50-minute bus ride away from Prague.

Situated at the confluence of the Labbe and Vltava rivers, Mělník offered us the perfect scope for our water testing activities, allowing us to take samples from two major bodies of water in one day.

Mělník has historically made its money through the rich surrounding farmland, having been founded by a Slavic tribe called the "Pšovans".

An interesting side note, Saint Ludmila, grandmother to the famous guy sitting on top of a horse in Wencelas Square, Prague, was from this very tribe.

The town now plays host to a large dockyard as visible in the north of the map, and sees a high volume of shipping containers passing its banks. It is one of the primary routes for water traffic in and out of Prague.

With this in mind we began the day's testing in earnest, filming each step along the way for our new video (which will be published as soon as my computer stops acting like drunken thespian and finally decides to do some work).

I was in charge of checking the air and water temperatures, Gosia looked after the dissolved oxygen measurement, and Natasha was in charge of pH.

We learnt about the interesting relationship between acidity and the reproductive cycles of fish. A new piece of information for myself was the connection between air and water temperature and dissolved oxygen. The lower the temperature, the more oxygen can be stored in the water.

Despite the high levels of traffic, the waters at both sites proved to be well within the safety zone for all measurements, which are detailed below:

Air Temp:10° c
Water Temp: 8 ° c
Dissolved Oxygen: 2ppm (34% saturation)
pH: 8
Turbidity:40 JTU

We entered our results at the website of World Water Monitoring Day.

Cameron Murphy
YEE EVS volunteer

Map Legend

1. Bus Station

2. First test site

3. Labbe

4. Vltava

5. Canal

6. Docks