The purpose of this activity is for students to investigate water quality, and the factors that affect it, at a local beach. This is accomplished by (1) measuring concentrations of Escherichia coli and Enterococcus, two types of bacteria commonly used as fecal indicators, in water and sand samples from a local beach; (2) interpreting the collected data with graphs, tables, and statistical tests; and (3) investigating the relationship between concentrations of fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) and other factors such as sampling location, distance from the shoreline, and grain size of sand. 

Knee, K.L., R.L. Leopold, E.R. Madsen, and A. Paytan. 2008. Hands-on oceanography: Assessing the importance of sand as a source of fecal indicator bacteria (Escherichia coli and Enterococcus). Oceanography 21(3):98–106, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2008.44.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.