At left - the view from Indian Creek near the Cedar Rapids Linn County Solid Waste Agency facility on County Home Road. They are working with Emery Davis, the Indian Creek Soil Health Cooridnator, to install practices for nutrient removal on their farm ground
While it's been a hot muggy week in eastern Iowa, we've still been out gathering samples and data. We've added several sites in our work with the Indian Creek Soil Health project in which we're mostly gathering background data in support of project which will be going in this fall. Next summer, we'll be looking at the effectiveness of wetlands, biofilters, and saturated buffers at removing nutrients before they enter Indian Creek.
At left - the view from Indian Creek near the Cedar Rapids Linn County Solid Waste Agency facility on County Home Road. They are working with Emery Davis, the Indian Creek Soil Health Cooridnator, to install practices for nutrient removal on their farm ground
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Congratulations to Alyssa Olson, Maddie Mathers, and Marissa Hedlund for graduating from Coe in May of this year. Marissa will be working on a Ph.D. in physics at the University of New Hampshire, Maddie will be attending the University of California - Davis specializing in agricultural and environmental chemistry, and Alyssa will be taking a year away from academics before medical school. Alyssa had a rather spectuacular spring semester outside the classroom. She led Coe's softball team to the NCAA Regionals while striking out 201 batters over 154.2 innings pitched and amassing a 1.72 earned run average with an opposition batting average of only .186. She was named Second Team Google Cloud Academic All-American and National Fastpitch Coaches Association Third Team All-American.
And congrats to our collaborator Rebecca Kauten, who successfully defended her thesis on June 12, 2019. Her work included a detailed study of chloride in winter strreet runoff and effects on metal mobilization. Many of those winter samples were collected and analyzed by Alyssa Olson in the Coe Water Quality Lab. And congratulations to Amanda Kohn, who moved into a new position as a Sustainability Planner II for Weston and Sampson in Boston. Amanda works with governments to develop plans for increasing resiliency toward climate change. Laura Bybee ('16) returned to Coe to talk about her graduate work at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her talk, titled ”Natural abundance of 15N reveals ammonia loss in manure digesters and lagoons” introduced Coe students to the use of isotopic measurements to better understand envrionmental phenomna. Maddy Jensen ('17) and Danielle Hollingshead ('18), who are both graduate stduents in environmental engineering at the University of Iowa, came up to hear Laura's presentation. We've been working with Northeast Iowa RC&D since 2014 to continue their long-running program of water quality sampling in the Upper Iowa watershed. They have a great website which you should browse - and in particular, their pages on water quality. They explain the importance of measuring water quality, and do a great job of presenting the data. Be sure to take a look.
The Mount Vernon/LIsbon chapter of Women for Water (a relatively new non-partisan group focusing on water issues), recently sponsored a workshop on water quality issues in Iowa featuring presentations with Todd Dornan (CR Gazette columnist and editorial board member) talking about water quality in the legislature, and yours truly giving an overview. You can watch it on YouTube here if you're interested
And once again, follow Chris Jones' blog if you really want to understand the issues behind Iowa's water quality. The posts from February 28 and March 6 address critical problems which will need to be addressed if we actually want to improve the quality of Iowa's waters. Check out this video from the Iowa Water Center featuring our collaborator, Rebecca Kauten. Rebecca is a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa, and Alyssa Olson worked with her last winter to gather data about the impacts of road salts on surface waters. You'll see some familiar scenes from Coe and Cedar Rapids, as well as some footage of Alyssa explaining her work. (Zoe Bakken-Heck and Cara Mattteson (City of Cedar Rapids stormwater coordinator) are in there too!)
CWQL celebrated with an installation and a publication! We have our new ion chromatograph installed, we're trained, and we're ready to go. It's a Metrohm Eco IC with an 858 Professional Sample Processor. Looking forward to getting it rolling this spring. Also had another paper come from our collaboration with scientists at the Iowa Geological Survey Bureau - "Soil sedimentation and quality within the roadside ditches of an agricultural watershed" with authors Matthew T. Streeter, Keith E. Schilling, Martin St. Clair, and Zachary Demanett was published in Science of the Total Environment (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.113). Nice update - the Iowa Nutrient Center has been featuring the "roadside ditches" paper in releases to the press. The news release is here; it was also picked up in the High Plains Journal. Thanks to Cara Matteson (Cedar Rapids Stormwater Coordinator) for inviting Coe to present at the Innovative Stormwater Management Tour on October 17. This well attended event included a presentation on what Coe is doing to reduce our stormwater footprint, and a bus tour which included the permeable alley (installed by the city) right next to the permeable parking lot (installed by Coe).
Thanks to the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, who funded a proposal titled “Ion Chromatograph to Support Collaboration”. The grant will allow us to replace our aging instrument (16 years old). The proposal was based on the idea that having grant funded instrumentation enables us to provide low-cost and no-cost analyses to other non-profits (such as Watershed Management Authorities, Indian Creek Nature Center, Linn County Conservation, and others). While not a typical funding source for scientific instrumentation, we appreciate the affirmation of the work that we do.
And...looking forward to additional work in the Indian Creek watershed. Led by Jennifer Fencl and Jon Gallagher, the “Indian Creek Soil Health Partnership” was funded by Iowa Partners for Conservation – Natural Resources Conservation Service. The grant includes funding for additional sampling and analyses in the watershed in support of implementation of best management practices in the watershed. They're in the Denver/Ft. Collins area. Deanna Marguglio and Jacob Fuentes may be the only water quality researchers to be elected Homecoming king and queen in the same year. And they are also great examples of how a liberal arts education prepares you for careers you never thought about as an undergraduate. Deanna is the member education coordinator for the Gamma Phi Beta International sorority. As a part of her work, she has become an expert in distance learning and Learning Management Systems. (I'm pretty sure we didn't cover that in Analytical.) Jacob Fuentes is a sensory scientist with New Belguim Brewing - yes, that means what you think it means. He coordinates panels who taste and smell the beer and report the results - and he also identifies the chemicals which result in those tastes and aromas. Some marketing, some biology, and some chemistry - make a great beer. |
AuthorMarty St. Clair is a chemistry and environmental studies professor at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Archives
November 2023
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