Marty
I toook an early retirement offer from Coe, and am now a research scientist at the University of Iowa. I work with IIHR managing their network of nitrate sensors across the state, and with CHEEC to help them expand their sampling network. If you're in Iowa City, stop by Trowbridge Hall and say hello.
Marty
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It was a busy fall for Maddy Jensen - after defending her thesis (see below), she got married on November 5 - congratulations, Maddy! Fellow CWQL members at the wedding included Danielle Land and Laura Bybee. And speaking of Danielle - she will soon be finishing up her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa and heading off to Flint, Michigan to do a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. Congrats to Danielle! Upon hearing that Cornell College's new data scientist was looking for data, we provided 20 years worth of monitoring data for him to take a look at. Dr. Tyler George is in Cornell's department of Mathematics and Statistics, and was looking for opportunities for his students to explore. Brian Cochran did a great job of putting together a dashboard of our data, which gives the user an opportunity to explore the data in multiple ways. Take a look here! Many thanks to Tyler, Brian, and to the Cornell CSRI program for supporting their work. We're well into another season of monitoring, with four college students and one high school intern studying eastern Iowa waterways. They are visiting many of our regular sites (including the "Big Loop") as well as looking at the effectiveness of edge-of-field practices (saturated buffers, wetlands, bioreactors) in the Indian Creek watershed. With a wet spring following a dry 2021, we've seen some high (>50 mg NO3-N) tile drainage concentrations leading to >10 mg NO3-N in many of our surface waters. We've also been seeing a variety of wildlife - pheasants, turkeys, deer, frogs, and a turtle at Wanatee county park. In other news, Professor St. Clair presented a seminar to the Grinnell chemistry department earlier this spring, and a paper originating from a collaboration with state geologist Keith Schilling was just accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. We'll be presenting our work with the Indian Creek Soil Health Partnership on June 21 at a field day. (Contact Emery Davis at [email protected] if you're interested in attending.) In particular, we'll be reporting our results from evaluating edge-of-field practices in the Indian Creek watershed - including a farm pond (49.8% reduction in nitrate concentration), a woodchip biofilter (76.2% reduction in nitrate concentration), and two saturated buffers (93.2% and 85.9% reduction in nitrate concentrations).
You can see a presentation about another biofilter in the Indian Creek watershed at Practical Farmers of Iowa's website. We're ready to go with another season of field work. It's a big group this year, with six students working this summer. They will be continuing long standing sampling routes (the "Big Loop" for the 22nd year) as well as working with the city of Cedar Rapids in support of their work in the Middle Cedar. We'll also continue monitoring for the Indian Creek Soil Health Partnership and Emery Davis, helping to assess the effectiveness of saturated buffers and biofilters installed this past fall.
In other news - Coe received the Stormwater and Urban Watershed Partner of the Year Award on October 16, 2020 from the Iowa Stormwater Education Partnership (ISWEP). The award was in recognition of the college's work to incorporate stormwater reduction practices such as green roofs, permeable paving, and rain gardens into the campus. And the lab contributed to another publication - you can find "Aquifer Lithology Affects Shallow Groundwater Quality More Than N Fertilizer Form and Placement Method in an Iowa Agricultural Field" in Agrosystems, Geosciences & Environment. The paper is another collaboration with Keith Schilling at the Iowa Geological Survey. Nice coverage of Emery Davis and his work with the Indian Creek Soil Health Partnership in the Cedar Rapids Gazette and on local TV stations. In the last month, he has overseen the construction of a biofilter which will remove nitrate from ~100 acres near the Tuma soccer complex, and the installation of a saturated buffer that will do the same for ~40 acres near County Home Rd. and Highway 13 (pictured here). We have done measurements on the tile lines which will be treated by these installations, and will continue to monitor their effectiveness. On a less positive note, there was also a report on Iowa's annual assessment of how many of our surface waters cannot be used for their designated purposes due to water quality issues. In reality, this exercise points out the minimal amount of monitoring the state does, and how few of the resulting plans (TMDLs) are actually implemented. ...began in late spring, when Coe (and the rest of higher education) sent students home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the plan had been to have 5-6 students working this summer, the need for distancing resulted in instead having no students. As a result, yours truly did all the sampling and most of the analyses (with some help from Professor Cindy Strong of Cornell College on TSS and E. coli). I continued the long term study on the "big loop" (almost 20 years of data), did some sampling in the Indian Creek and Lime Creek watersheds, expanded work with Emery Davis (Indian Creek Soil Health), and began a new collaboration with Linn County Conservation. In addition, I also continued providing analyses for projects in the Turkey River, Upper Iowa, Upper Wapsi, and Maquoketa River watersheds - and continued our snapshot program in the Middle Cedar with the Iowa Soybean Association and analyses for Keith Schilling and friends at the Iowa Geological Survey Bureau. So yeah, I feel like it's been a busy summer - but I was also reminded how much I enjoy being out in the field. (But I do appreciate how much my students usually do!) Top off the pandemic summer with a historic windstorm that struck Cedar Rapids on August 10 - literally destroying or damaging half the trees on campus and knocking out power and internet (see picture above from the quad door of Peterson during the storm) - and, well...a long strange summer. We'll miss three CWQL members who graduated this past May - Donald Janda will be pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry at Pittsburgh, while Daniel Turley will be doing the same at Iowa State University. Good luck, Donald and Daniel! Zoe Bakken-Heck decided to enter the working world, and is an Air Quality Specialist and Asbestos Site Supervisor for the Institute of Environmental Assessment in Minneapolis. Past grads were in the news. UI grad student Maddy Jensen ('17) was featured in a nice article on Coe's web page about her work in trying to build a better filter for health care workers. Fellow environmental engineering student Danielle Hollingshead ('18) was in the Cedar Rapids Gazette for her work looking at lead in Iowa's drinking water. Madison Mathers ('19) was named a Delta Science Fellow for her Ph.D. work at UC Davis. And Alyssa Olson ('19) received a postgraduate NCAA scholarship to support her medical school studies at the University of Iowa. Congratulations! Also a nice paper using data from our lab via a collaboration with Keith Schilling at IGSB - "Dissolved phosphate concentrations in Iowa shallow groundwater" published in Journal of Environmental Quality in March 2020. Congratulations to Laura Bybee, who completed her masters degree in soil science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison at the end of the summer, and then began a position as Watershed Project Coordinator in Grundy Center, Iowa a week later!
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AuthorMarty St. Clair is a chemistry and environmental studies professor at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Archives
November 2023
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