This week (10/04/2018) marked the start of our service learning project. As such, a significant portion of the lab was spent covering the project's background, main ideas, goals and deliverables. After the initial introduction of the project, our group broke off and set to choosing an environmental aspect of the Dog River which would connect with the community as well as tie into the topics we have been covering in class. Many of our first ideas were heavily influenced by the group's interest in civil and infrastructure engineering as demonstrated by their common focus on engineered structures and roads. Some of the more thought through, though ultimately discarded, ideas included; bank erosion caused by improper road drainage, flow path alteration for crossings and bridges, and the dangers flooding posed to building constructed near a poorly graded riverbank as compared to those constructed with more conservative grading and distance. Bank erosion was discarded because of the relative success Vermont has had in protecting the Dog from major road-based erosion. We discarded flow path alterations because there were more variables than we were prepared to address in the time allotted as well as our uncertainty about the presence or significance of negative or positive effects as a result of minute alterations in the river's tract. Finally, we opted out of studying the structural dangers associated with improperly or under-graded banks because there were a number of other ideas discussing the same or similar ideas and we did not want to overlap more than necessary. Eventually we narrowed our topic down to salt's damaging effects on the river, as caused by highway de-icing in the winter, and potential methods of mitigation. In this, we had originally hoped to compare various salt removal or entrapment methods and attempt to quantify the best solution for the Northfield area. However, after researching road salt and its removal from water, we quickly discovered that there is little to no way to extract salt from water without extensive filtration or a required energy input that renders separation wholly impractical for this application. Upon discovering that we would be unable to remove the salt from the water once sufficiently dissolved, we decided to find ways to avoid introducing the salt altogether. This left us with the goal for our service learning project, exploring de-icing agents as an alternate to road salt to decrease the harmful effects of winterized roads on the surrounding ecosystem and hydrology. After establishing our goal, we broke the topic into three central ideas and chose one of our three group members for each section. These sections were; sources of contamination -where the salt comes from and how it could be decreased- ,harmful effects -and why the issue is worth addressing-, and solutions -solutions specifically focused on alternates other that salt-. Once we had the topic decentralized, we built a website on Wix as our initial media for presentation and started researching our applicable sections. These sections and their updates were then set up in the form of blogs to better share the development of our idea through the website.