Message from the Director
IT'S ABOUT TIME
"Time," wrote Henry David Thoreau, "is but the stream I go a-fishing in." Here at the Stroud Center, time obviously isn't the only stream we wade into. But it is a critical aspect of all our work, and we encounter it in many different ways and guises. One thing, however, never changes - we can't seem to find enough of it.
Time is one of our greatest assets. It reflects the longevity of our collective experience and the continuity of our experimental data. Hard as it is for some of us to believe, we have been in the business of scientific research for thirty-four years. We have a continuous thirty year record of the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of the White Clay Creek experimental area. Our senior staff brings over 120 years of experience to bear on streams and rivers.
Time is continuity, as evidenced by Tom Bott's thirty-three years, by Sally Peirson's twenty-eight years, by an average tenure among our senior scientists of over nineteen years.
Time is a gift our volunteers have given us so selflessly over the years - from monitoring streams to raising funds.
But in today's world time can also be a liability, as we all must act under its constraints. People want fast answers to pressing questions about the Earth's water; yet to gather, sort, analyze and truly understand the knowledge we seek takes months, and often years. There are no short cuts, and so often there simply isn't the time to do all we want and need to do.
Finally, time is a critical aspect of our research, where everything from algal metabolism to stream flow gets expressed in terms of time and where our sampling protocols range from an hour for bacterial studies to a decade for stream channel movement.
We have never had an official clock at Stroud, yet time, and the perspective it gives, permeate our lives: How fast is the instrument (response time)? How good is the sample (holding time)? How productive is the employee (time sheets)?
And whether we measure by the millisecond or the millennium, we strive always to make our research timely and to ensure that it stands the rigorous test of time.
Bern Sweeney
Director
