What did we find?

The first thing we found was exactly what we had expected: high use trails were being used more often than the low use trails. This was confirmed not only from the number of people seen on the trail but also the number of dogs accompanying them.

Figure 1 shows the number of dogs observed per hour. There were many more dogs seen in the high use trails than the low use trails, especially on the Allandale Road trail. Of the dogs seen, almost all of the dogs were off-leash, despite park rules.

Figure 2 on the right shows the amount of faecal deposits per kilometer of trail. We found, for the most part, was that trails where we saw a lot of dogs did indeed have more faeces present along the trail. Again, high use trails had much more faeces then low use trails. This shows again that many people are not cleaning up after their dogs and not following the rules of the park. There were also a lot of plastic bags tied in trees and left on the ground, especially on Allandale Road trail. This could, over time, actually prove to be worse for the environment!

We found most of the bacterial pollution within the industrial section of Pippy Park. Although we did not find colonies of E. coli on the Allandale Road trail, there were great aggregations downstream which could suggest that animal waste (along with a few other sources) is being introduced into the water upstream.

Figure 1: Number of dogs seen per hour along multiple trails

Figure 2: Number of fecal deposits seen per kilometer on multiple trails

Figure 3: A bacterial colony plate, showing E. coli and other coliform bacteria