Hi, I’m with the southwest Florida water management district today. We’re challenging you to think about water conservation. Before we define what water conservation is, let’s begin by brainstorming the different ways that we use water in our lives.

For example, how do you used water in and outside of your home? For an extra challenge, pause this video now and try to create your own list of that ways you use water at home before seeing what we come up with together.

Let’s start in the kitchen. Here we use water everyday to drink, cook, prepare our food, and to wash our dishes. We may even use it to make ice. Water is an essential part of the kitchen.

Let’s move on to the bathroom next. I can spot many different ways that we use water here. We might use it to take a shower or a bath, to brush our teeth or to wash our hands. And for other human needs, I think we can all agree that water is an important part of good hygiene. But water in the home isn’t just used inside, let’s go outside.

Water is used to take care of lawns, gardens, and plant beds. For example, here is some fresh basil that was grown from seed, it wouldn’t be able to germinate and grow without water. Now, aside from the home we live in, we use water in many other ways.

For instance, farmers rely on water in order to grow food and to raise livestock. For industrial purposes and for recreation such as swimming, fishing, boating and kayaking, the list is endless. But we’re not the only ones that rely on water. Plants, wildlife and natural communities depend on water to survive as well.

So, what does it mean to conserve water? To conserve water means to use it wisely and to not be wasteful. Water conservation is important to meet the current and future needs of us as humans and to the meet the needs of the plants, animals and the environment.

Let’s think back to that list we made of different ways that we use water. Now tell me, were those uses mostly reliant on fresh water or salt water? It was fresh water. Although over 70 percent of the earth is covered in water, the majority of that is salt water, found in oceans and seas.

Fresh water only accounts for a small portion of the water on earth. In fact, of all the water on earth, less than one percent is fresh water that is available for us to use. Meaning it’s not trapped in glaciers or too polluted in west central Florida, more than 90 percent of our freshwater supply comes from groundwater, most commonly the Floridan aquifer.

Other sources of fresh water include surface waters such as lakes, rivers, streams or ponds. Both surface and ground water supplies primarily rely on rainfall to refill them and as you know, it doesn’t rain everyday here in Florida. And of the rainfall we do receive, only two to forty percent will soak in the ground and recharge the aquifer.

We need to be mindful of the amount of water we use because we have such a limited supply of fresh water available and due to our growing population with many families moving to Florida each year. We do have other sources of water to rely on such as reusing wastewater or treating salt water at a desalination plant.

However, these can be more costly and rely on more resources and time to develop, but fear not, we can all do our part to conserve water. Here are some examples of ways that you can use water wisely at home. Inside, turn off the faucet when scrubbing dishes, brushing your teeth or washing your hands don’t let the water run down the drain when it’s not in use. Take shorter showers, challenge everyone in your house to take a five-minute shower to save water, flush less and check for leaks. Only flush the toilet when you need to and don’t use it as a trash can, check toilets and faucets for leaks regularly. A leaky toilet can waste up to 200 gallons of water a day!

Lastly, install water saving fixtures. Low flow shower heads and faucet aerators help to reduce the amount of water being used per minute. Outside, water your lawn and plants only when needed, over watering creates an unhealthy environment for plants and also wastes water.

Follow the Florida-friendly landscaping program guidelines to keep an outdoor area looking beautiful while also saving water. Use a nozzle on your garden hose; by adding a nozzle to your garden hose you’ll be able to turn the water on and off and reduce water waste.

Also, remember to watch the weather and wait to water your lawn. Remember that rainfall is a natural and free source of water, only water your lawn if it needs more water. Together we can make sure that there’s enough water today and for future generations.

ANNE THOMPSON: All the water on Earth today, every drop, is all the water there has ever been on the planet. Freshwater is actually millions of years old. The same water, flowing in a continuous loop- falling as rain and snow from clouds to the Earth's surface, running in rivers, pooling in ponds, flowing from faucets, irrigating crops, traveling through plants, generating power, eventually evaporating into the air and condensing into clouds again.

ANNA MICHALAK: Why is there life on Earth? The reason there is life on Earth is because Earth has this perfect water cycle.

THOMPSON: The Water Cycle, so simple even small children understand the basics, yet so complex, the most advanced earth scientists, hydrologists, geologists, and biogeochemists are studying every part and process.

MARTHA CONKLIN: The Water Cycle is fascinating. It's something that's around us all the time, and yet we don't really understand it.

THOMPSON: How to summarize what is known about the Water Cycle? With two words- flows and stores. The Water Cycle is a series of flows of water between various water stores or storages. Clouds in the atmosphere...

TOM HARMON: There's always a little bit of water in the atmosphere. We talk about relative humidity- it's a humid day, it's a dry day- either way, there's water, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

THOMPSON: There's a lot of water in the oceans—70% of all the water on Earth, in the ice sheets and glaciers—two-thirds of all the fresh water on Earth, in the snow packs atop mountains like the Sierra Nevada, in the Great Lakes, in rivers and streams, in reservoirs and watersheds, in wetlands, in the soil, in and on plants and trees rooted in the soil, and beneath the soil, in water tables and underground aquifers like the Ogallala-High Plains, which runs underneath parts of eight states, from South Dakota to Texas. All this storage is temporary. Water, in all its forms, is always in flux and always moving. And there's a name for every kind of movement in the Water Cycle starting with precipitation.

MICHALAK: Precipitation is the process of water falling onto the surface of the Earth. You can have precipitation in many forms—rain, snow, hail.

THOMPSON: Rain is falling water in liquid form. Snow, ice, hail and sleet are falling water in solid, or frozen form. Fog and mist? Falling water in gas or vapor form. Precipitation that falls directly into the oceans becomes part of surface ocean and can be churned by wave and wind action into ocean currents. Rain and snow that falls directly on rivers and streams becomes one part of stream flow. Rain that falls onto land takes a different path to the river as does the snow and ice that falls and collects on mountaintops when temperatures warm.

CONKLIN: When snow melts, some of it runs through the snowpack and goes into small streams, tributaries that feed into large rivers.

THOMPSON: What about the precipitation that falls on and over land? Some is intercepted by vegetation— plants and trees.

HARMON: Like you might imagine, someone in a game of football intercepting a pass, these are raindrops trying to come to the ground, and leaves on the tree intercept them before they hit the ground.

THOMPSON: And the precipitation that does hit the ground? It can run off if the ground is hardscaped— covered with asphalt or concrete- or if the soil is too wet, or saturated to absorb more water, like an over soaked sponge. Otherwise, precipitation infiltrates the soil surface, percolates into the ground.

HARMON: Think of it as the water percolating through your coffee grounds in the morning. Gravity continues to pull it downwards so it will move through.

THOMPSON: Through the topsoil, into spaces between soil and rock particles, down to bedrock, and further, into fractures, into deep underground aquifers. Even groundwater here is moving sideways, or laterally, discharging toward a river, lake or the sea, generally the deeper the flow, the slower the flow.

CONKLIN: Some of that fractured water might take a very long time, thousands to millions of years, to get out.

THOMPSON: And how does water get back out into the atmosphere? It evaporates, is turned from a liquid into a gas or vapor, by the heat of the sun.

MICHALAK: If you put a bit of water into a bowl and you set it outside on a sunny day, it's going to disappear. It's still water, it's just in the form of a gas rather than in the form of a liquid.

THOMPSON: Water evaporates from every wet surface – even from wet air. Some rain and snow evaporates into the air while falling. Water evaporates through our respiration and perspiration and from plants, through transpiration. Trans means through or across. Plant roots draw up groundwater.

MICHALAK: And plants pull that water up through their stems into their leaves and then release it back out through evapotranspiration.

THOMSPON: Evapotranspiration, a spelling bee worthy term for evaporation from soil and water surfaces, plus transpiration from plants. Evaporated water molecules are tiny enough to flow into the air. Mix with smoke and dirt particles in the atmosphere. Cool, condense, into visible masses of water vapor – clouds. Winds move clouds into colder air, water droplets collide and merge, grow bigger and heavier, until they are so heavy, they fall again as rain or snow, sleet or hail. Precipitation. Collection. Runoff. Interception. Infiltration. Percolation. Discharge. Transpiration. Evaporation. Condensation. The Water Cycle.

The City of Fredericton gets its drinking water from a groundwater supply located under the downtown area of the city. There are eleven drinking water wells that are located in the Wilmot Park and Queen Square neighbourhoods that bring this water to the surface.

These wells get their water from the South Fredericton Aquifer, which is a layer of sand and gravel trapped between rock and clay under downtown Fredericton.

Unlike surface water, this groundwater is naturally cleaned as it passes through the sand and gravel, making it clearer, cleaner, and colder. The aquifer is refilled from these three main sources:

• 1. Riverbank Filtration from the Saint John River (60–70%)
  2. Water runoff (10–30%)
  3. Water coming up from the rock below (5–10%)

Water from the aquifer is pumped by one of the eleven wells and sent to one of two water treatment plants. At these plants, chlorine is added to disinfect the water and to change manganese into a form that can be removed during filtration.

Lime is also added to raise the pH, which helps protect the pipes from corrosion. The filtration system removes 99.9% of the manganese, and the treated water is then stored in the distribution system, ready for people to use and consume.

Saint John’s drinking water comes from two main sources: protected surface water lakes and underground aquifers. The Loch Lomond and Latimer Lake watersheds supply the Loch Lomond Drinking Water Treatment Facility, which can produce up to 75 million litres of treated water per day for most of the city.

On the west side, the South Bay Wellfield contains three large wells at this site collect water from aquifers deep below the ground's surface. It’s then pumped to the South Bay Treatment Facility where it's treated and sent through the distribution system.

Saint John Water owns, operates, and maintains two well houses in the Red Head Area in East Saint John. This groundwater system supplies chlorinated well water to about 450 residences in the Harbourview subdivision.

Once collected, the water is treated to remove impurities and protect the distribution system. Chlorine is added to disinfect, orthophosphate is added to help prevent pipe corrosion, and surface water receives additional treatment like coagulation, filtration, and dissolved air flotation. After treatment, the clean water is stored in reservoirs or pumped directly into the distribution system, where it travels through a network of pipes to reach the taps around the city.