About — The Trinity Pond Observatory

storytreehouse2008@gmail.com · Centreville, Virginia

I am standing at the pond edge holding a large catfish horizontally in both hands, apartment buildings and water behind me. — **At the pond**A bullhead catfish, held for the photograph and released. Four summers of Saturdays produced 525 fish across seven species; this was one of the larger ones.

The project

Trinity Pond Observatory, 2023–2026

A study carried out independently on an urban stormwater retention pond according to a fixed weekly timetable over four summers.

I prepared the sampling protocol and adhered to it over the course of 48 sessions, totaling 269 hours; I recorded 525 fish from seven different species and took 75 hand-written measurements of the pH. The data was compiled and cleaned using Python, combined with NOAA's daily weather records, checked in relation to temperature and rainfall, and a transparent water-temperature model was developed for the one variable that could not be measured directly.

Two errors in the results published for the project have been found and corrected: one concerning the number of fish, which had invalidated an earlier conclusion, and the other relating to a water-temperature model that had silently taken into account the air temperature from the previous season.

What it demonstrates

Carrying on for four years without any supervision. Handling actual data from a real dataset. Giving an honest account of uncertainty, including the publication of null results and the withdrawal of claims. And the decision to keep the measurements and the estimates visibly distinct.

See the analysis → · Read the papers →