guide for dirty waters review.pdf

EUTROPHICATION

LEON GREEN© BALTIC SEA MEDIA PROJECT

THE BALTIC SEA- LESSONS TO LEARN ABOUT EUTROPHICATIONSTUDY GUIDE TO THE DOCUMENTARYDIRTY WATERS

STUDENT COMPENDIUM

The Baltic Sea is surrounded by some of the world’s most environmentally conscious societies. And scientists all agree on the most important steps to take. Still, in many respects, the state of this sensitive and almost landlocked sea is deteriorating. The efforts to save the sea are spoiled by national disagreements and short-term interest.

The future and life quality of 90 million people are affected by the Baltic Sea environment. The next ten years will be critical. Can we save the sea that ties us together?

Filmmakers Mattias Klum and Folke Rydén are spending ten years documenting efforts to save the Baltic Sea. Focusing on the decision-making processes for environmental, scientific and political issues, the aim is to produce a television documentary every other year in cooperation with public service broadcasters around the region.

More information: www.saveourbalticsea.com

Baltic Sea 2020 is a private foundation with the main goal to contribute to turning the negative environmental trend of the Baltic Sea in a positive direction by the year 2020. This is achieved through using a donation of 500 million SEK for concrete measures such as: research, opinion making and active engagement in projects.

Read more about Baltic Sea 2020 at: www.balticsea2020.org

http://www.saveourbalticsea.com

www.balticsea2020.org

STUDY GUIDE TO DIRTY WATERS

STUDENT COMPENDIUM

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6 6

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10111213141415

16

CONTENTS

BEFORE WATCHING THE FILMGlossaryMap workThe Big PictureHow do we save our Baltic Sea?

WHILE WATCHING THE FILMThe main message

AFTER YOU HAVE WATCED THE FILMThe journey of the nutrientsThe dilemmaThe best fieldThe wetlandsThe facts of lifeOur daily choicesTrue or FalseThe political choice

Links


STUDENT COMPENDIUM

4

BEFORE YOU WATCH THE FILM

GLOSSARY

The documentary Dirty Waters discusses eutrophication, a state where there is too much nutrients

in the water or on land. Nitrogen and Phosphorous are two most common and important

nutrients; they are available in the forms of Nitrate and Phosphate, a different chemical state for

each nutrient. Algae are primitive chlorophyll-containing mainly aquatic organisms lacking true

stems, roots and leaves. Brackish water is slightly salty water, usually a mix between salt water and

fresh water which is found in the Baltic Sea. Dead zones are areas of the sea bed where there is no

oxygen and where no fish or animals can survive. Cyanobacteria are a special kind of bacteria that

looks a bit like algae. They can photosynthesize just like algae and form great blooms in the Baltic

Sea during the summer. Nodularia is one such cyanobacteria, sometimes refered to as blue-green

algae. Plankton are small organisms that drift in water masses. You can find them both in sea and

freashwater areas. Precipitation is the same thing as rain and snow.

MAP WORK

When it rains on land, the water continues to move down into the earth and onwards through streams and rivers if it isn’t taken up by plants or transpired up into the clouds again.

A water catchment area is the land that has a common place where the water that falls on it ends up, like a lake in a mountain valley. Use the map of the Baltic Sea catchment area combined with an atlas to answer the following questions:

• Which land has the longest coastline towards the Baltic Sea?

• Which land in the Baltic Sea region has the most cities with over 100 000 inhabitants?

• Which land has the most rivers that end in the Baltic Sea?



STUDENT COMPENDIUM

5


THE BIG PICTURE

Use the facts from The Big Picture - application at the www.saveourbalticsea.com site and try to find the answers to the questions below. Give an answer to the Think questions as well and discuss the answers in the class.

1. What is the salinity outside of Copenhagen?

2. What is the salinity outside of Tallinn? Think: Why do different parts of the Baltic Sea have different salt levels?

3. Was there more chlorophyll in the water 2005 than 2000? Think: Why are there more noticeable plankton blooms in the Baltic Sea than in the Atlantic Ocean?

4. At what survey station was the biggest dead zone noticed in the Baltic Sea in the year 2010?

5. What year was the largest measured area of dead zones so far recorded? Think: Why does a bottom ‘die’?

6. How much more nitrate was recorded at F3 if you compare 2010 with 1995?

7. How much Phosphate could be measured outside Landskrona 1995? Think: What are the sources of the nutrient emissions? Where do they come from?



STUDENT COMPENDIUM

6


HOW DO WE SAVE OUR BALTIC SEA?

Though the tidings might look dark concerning all the environmental and social problems looming of the Baltic Sea horizon there is still a lot of work carried out to save our precious sea.

NGO’s, universitites and authorities in the different states around the Baltic Sea have initiated projects that try to, in different ways, save the Baltic Sea.

Go to the following websites: www.helcom.fi (look for BSAP), www.balticsea2020.org and www.balticnest.org. They have a lot of examples of different projects. Chose one project and work in groups of three to gather information and present the project to your fellow students in small groups of several project presenters. Gather information on:

• The focus of the project, what is it really about?

• What is the projects goal?

• What kind of result have they achieved?

WHILE WATCHING THE FILM

THE MAIN MESSAGE

What is the documentary’s main message? Think about these questions while watching the film Dirty waters.

1. What in this film is news for you?

2. What did you think about the film in general?

3. What is the main message of the film?

4. What do you think the people who made the film want us to think?

5. How does the film affect you?

http://www.helcom.fi

http://www.balticsea2020.org

http://www.balticnest.org


STUDENT COMPENDIUM

7

AFTER YOU HAVE WATCHED THE FILM


THE JOURNEY OF THE NUTRIENTS

When water rains on the ground it often travels down into ditches, then streams, rivers and finally, the sea. It can carry a lot of substances with it; perhaps you have seen the brown water in a river after a heavy rain? The water can also carry nutrients. Depending on where the water travels, it receives or gives nutrients from and to the surrounding environment. These places are called sources (where it picks up nutrients) and sinks (where nutrients are used up by processes in the nature).

• Follow the water drop on the next page and when you get to a letter on the picture calculate how much nutrients it contains after it has left that station.

• The unit for nutrients in the example is µmol/L (micro moles per liter), a measurement of how many molecules of nutrients that exists per given unit.

Calculus example:A drop of water that ends up on a field with fertilizer or manure and takes up 2,0 µmol/L. It carries on towards a dam where there is heavy growth of water plants. The water drop is derived of nutrients by the plants and looses 1,2 µmol/L of its nutrients. When the drop carries on from the dam it contains µmol/L of its nutrients.

There are two ways for the water to go and two paths where it can enter the landscape. Try out two different routes (A1 and A2) and keep track of the amount of nutrients the different ways bring to the sea. Answer the questions when you have followed the drop of water:

• How much nutrients got out in the Baltic Sea when you traveled through the wetlands?• How much nutrients got out into the sea when you traveled through the city?• At what site did the water take up the most nutrients? • Are there any paths you can take to treat the drop of water from eutrophication?

Facts about nutrients:

Manure has been used for as long as people have been farming as a way to increase the nutrients in the soil. And nutrients are good, but only in the right amounts. Manure from animals is a very good source of nutrients because it is natural, and no energy is needed to make it (apart from feeding the animals, but you do that to make them grow anyway).

If you fertilize too much the crops can’t use all of the nutrients and it’ll be washed away with the next rain. They travel through the streams and lakes and eventually end up in the Baltic Sea. Algae and aquatic plants benefit from the nutrient load and start to grow fast. When winter comes, they die, sink to the bottom and decompose. The bacteria that decompose use a lot of oxygen in the process. With too much organic matter that need decomposing, the oxygen gets depleted. That way you get a dead zone, where no organisms apart from sulphur bacteria can survive.

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STUDENT COMPENDIUM

10


THE DILEMMA

On our webpage www.saveourbalticsea.com under the tab Get involved (The dilemma) you can read about how the whole puzzle is connected: why the Baltic Sea is eutrophicated and what happens with the nutrients in the water.

Read the texts and answer the five questions below:

1. What do plants use Phosphates for?

2. Is the cyanobacteria Nodularia nitrate or phosphate limited? What does it mean?

3. Why are nutrients carried out into the water?

4. How do dead zones occur?

5. Which three farm animals are the main manure producers? Why those three?



STUDENT COMPENDIUM

11


THE BEST FIELD

There are many places where crop can grow; some have deep soil others shallow. In some places there is a lot of rain, in others just a little. The environmental condition is important for how to fertilize. A field at one site might hold nutrients better than one at another. Some sites are downright bad to fertilize at!

The different fields in the pictures are placed at different sites with different environmental conditions.

• Which field do you think holds nutrient the best and doesn’t need to be fertilized as often?

• Take a look at the conditions around the field. How is the weather?

• Can the nutrients be washed away?

• Is it in valley or a on a slope?

• Is there water nearby that can wash way the nutrients?

Pick the field that you think can hold the most nutrients in the ground. Divide yourselves into groups of five and discuss with three arguments why your chosen field can hold nutrients the best.


STUDENT COMPENDIUM

12

Winter

Habitat

Farmland

Amphibians

Nutrients

Graze

Biodiversity

THE WETLANDS

Below here is a description of the work and function of the wetlands.Some words are missing; they have ended up in a box below the text. Fill in the correct words to complete the text.

During the eighteen hundreds a lot of wetlands in Europe were drained to become fields. People dug ditches and dikes around the fields for them to dry up, and made waterways from the lakes so they wouldn’t flood and drench the fields during spring. Now people have started to realize that the wetlands are good for the farmland. They increase the biodiversity and bind excess nutrients from the fields. A lot of animals can also graze of the wetlands and in that way get free food. When building a wetland one can either fill in the ditches of a field, create walls that dam up the lake or nearby river or dig out the field surrounding the ditch to make an artificial lake. When water later on fills up by the rain new kinds of plants will start to like it there and a new habitat has been created. The best place to create a wetland is where there has been one down in history. They can often be found on old maps or perhaps old photographs or paintings. If the wetland is made very shallow a lot of plants will grow there and a lot of nutrients will be bound up. If there is too much growth in the wetlands, the plants must be harvested. Just as in the sea, many plants die during the winter, and when they are decomposed they release the nutrients they once used up to grow. One can either weed out with a machine and feed it to cows or horses, or you can have them graze directly of the wetland. No matter how you to choose to do it the nutrients are used for something new, which is a lot better than just having it run away to the sea where some algae use it. A wetland can bind up to a ton of nitrogen per year and hectare, which is a lot.

Many wild animals love to move around in the wetland. Among the grass and small islands you can find wading birds of different kinds such as snipes and curlews. Cranes and geese like the wetlands, just as gulls and terns. Many amphibians like it there as well, because there is a lot of warm water and protection in the tall grass. Even larger animals such as moose and deer stroll down into the water to eat water lilies.

Words:

Nitrogen

Weed out

Wading birds

Shallow

Drained

Algae



STUDENT COMPENDIUM

13

ORGANISM SALT OXYGEN LIGHT NUTRIENTS

CLADOPHRA (ALGAE) Medium x A lot A lot

BLUE MUSSLE A lot A lot x Medium

FLOUNDER

NODULARIA

SADURIA (PILL BUG)

BLADDER WRACK

THE FACTS OF LIFE

The different animals and plants in the Baltic Sea live in different places and like different kinds of water, even if they are quite adaptable. The four animals and plants below have different needs. Fill in the blank spaces and describe what kind of water they like. The different levels you can use are Little, Medium, and A Lot. If you think they don’t have a preference, just mark the box with an X. Se the example of the blue mussel and the Cladophora below.

The flounder is the most common flatfish in the Baltic Sea. It lives on sandy and muddy bottoms and eat worms, small crustaceans and mussels. When the larvae of the fish swim in the water they are turned upright just like regular fish, but when they grow to become bottom dwelling, one eye moves over to the other side and they lay down flat on the bottom. They live like that for the rest of their lives.

Nodularia is a cyanobacteria which a lot of people come across in the Baltic Sea. They are responsible for the huge blooms of plankton that can even be seen from satellite. It has a poison that makes it dangerous to eat for many animals and it is advised to keep small children out of the water when there are massive blooms near beaches.

The Saduira is a small crustacean that is related to pill bugs and wood lice (called isopods). They have been living in the Baltic since the ice age and are considered something of a relict. They can live on the bottom down to 290 meters of depth and like different kinds of substrates such as sand and mud, but also between the stalks of algae. It is also a very good swimmer.

The Bladder wrack is common in the Baltic Sea but also in the Atlantic and even as far away as the Pacific Ocean. It is a plant without leaves or stem that belong to the brown algae. They can cope with being out of the water for a while and can grow where there is a lot of tidal difference, which it isn’t in the Baltic Sea. The bladder wrack is home to a myriad of small animals living around it. To better reach the sunlight at the surface the bladder wrack has gas filled bladders that makes it float.


• How does the water look when it is eutrophicated? • Think about how the access to salt, oxygen, light and nutrients change when the sea becomes

over fertilized.


STUDENT COMPENDIUM

14

TRUE FALSE


OUR DAILY CHOICES

Our daily choices have consequences even for the Baltic Sea. The food we choose to eat and the clothes we buy can effect our environment. Below here is a list of common groceries. When each of those is made, it effects the nutrient load in the Baltic Sea in some way, but how? Discuss in small groups and come up with a common answer for each one. Present your answers to the class in a large group discussion moderated by the teacher.

• Pork chops

• Bread

• Omelet

• Mussels

• Milkshake

Facts about meat:In Europe we eat a lot of meat, especially around the Baltic Sea. The countries around the inner sea also produce a large amount of meat for export.

13 million tones of meat were produced in the year of 2008 by all the countries around the Baltic Sea put together.

In the Baltic Sea region we eat about 72 kilos of meat per person and year and that number is steadily rising.

Almost all production of eggs and meat effect the Baltic Sea in some way. A single pig disposes of three times as much waste as a human. On a pig farm of 20 000 pigs, that equals a whole city! (Without water treatment).

TRUE OR FALSE

Below there are some statements regarding the eutrophication in the Baltic Sea and what it effects. • Mark the statement as true or false by checking the box. • Pick three of the ten statements and write down a few sentences on why you believe it is true

or false!

What are the effects of eutrophication?

1. Diminishing biodiversity.

2. There are fewer summer guests around the Baltic Sea.

3. More oil is being spilled.

4. The Baltic Sea countries lose money.

5. The cod is diminishing.

6. The white-tailed eagle is coming back.

7. Trees around farms are dying.

8. The sea is getting warmer.

9. There is a smell of rotten eggs on research vessels.

10. More people can eat herring.


STUDENT COMPENDIUM

15


THE POLITICAL CHOICE

Around the Baltic Sea there are many different countries. All have their own inhabitants and their own interests to look to but we all share the Baltic Sea. Split into groups of three, each group gets a country to represent. Start out with researching about the country. Find out some facts about the country by using an up to date atlas or the internet. • How many people live in your country? • How long is your coastline to the Baltic

Sea? • How far does your territorial and

economical zones extend into the sea? • How much of the country is farmland

(if you can’t find a number, make an estimation by using a map)

• Do you have any large rivers flowing out into the Baltic Sea?

• Are there any large coastal cities in your country?

• Which is the lands major resource and economic profit (farming)?

Use the questions to decide on three arguments as to why you should or should not have to pay for the project described below (to build wetlands). If you have a lot of people living close to the Baltic Sea, perhaps you can do your own habitants well by helping the sea? Take a look at the countries around you, the ones you will face in the debate. It might be a good idea to come up with some solid arguments as on why they should pay instead of you (if you think they should).

After this preparation you will meet in an open debate. Your teacher will act as a moderator and decides who gets the word, but everybody should be allowed to present their arguments.

Debate: - Who should pay to build wetlands around the Baltic Sea?To restore wetlands is an efficient means to catch nutrients (as you know by now).

• But what country should pay the farmers to build wetlands?

• Why is that country supposed to pay? • Can there be unity among the countries?

Facts about politics:

The main source to eutrophication of the Baltic Sea is nitrogen and phosphorus leaking from the agricultural production, which includes meat production. Politicians decide on which rules should govern agriculture.

Politicians from all around the Baltic Sea met in Krakow in Poland in 2007, and decided on several measures to improve the environmental status of the Baltic Sea (Helcom Baltic Sea Action Plan). They decided that nitrogen discharges to the Baltic Sea should be reduced with 135 000 tons/year and phosphorus with 15 000 tons, from agriculture but also from municipal waste water and industries. Measures should be taken by 2016, but visible improvements of the sea are expected much later.

There are also EU regulations (Directives) which limits how much nitrogen and phosphorus is allowed to be discharged from wastewater treatment plants and industries. A new industry, intensive meat production, has evolved around the Baltic Sea the last couple of year. Manure from this type of industry leaks a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus to surrounding waters and eventually to the sea. It is important that EU has defined effective regulations also for this type of industry, and efficient monitoring and control that regulations are followed.


STUDENT COMPENDIUM

16

LINKS

www.saveourbalticsea.comwww.helcom.fiwww.balticsea2020.orgwww.balticnest.orgwww.b-s-p.orgwww.fimr.fi/en_GB



http://www.helcom.fi

http://www.balticsea2020.org

http://www.balticnest.org

http://www.b-s-p.org

http://www.fimr.fi/en_GB

WWW.BALTICSEA2020.ORG

Documents

guide for dirty waters review.pdf