Writer: Cammie Caldwell

Contact: Dr. Roderick Lammers; rod.lammers@uga.edu

The United States and the nation’s streams and rivers have an uneasy history: we need clean water to drink, to irrigate our agriculture, and for industry—not to mention the myriad of other species that rely on freshwater resources to survive—but increasing pollution, nutrient overloads, which can cause algal blooms and decreased water quality, erosion and deforestation put new demands on streams under worsening conditions.

However, Dr. Roderick Lammers, Research Scientist at the University of Georgia, is developing a way for industry and other organizations to even the debt with our freshwater resources through stream restoration crediting programs.

Specifically, Lammers has worked alongside Wright Water Engineers, an engineering firm in Denver, and other UGA researchers to create methods for quantifying benefits that stream restoration activities may provide to regions seeking to improve water quality. These methods are applicable to stream restoration projects everywhere, but are receiving the most attention in parts of the country with significant water quality challenges.

With an estimated 51 billion gallons of water flowing into it on a daily basis, and runoff from five states, the Chesapeake Bay receives large amounts of pollutants, and it serves as an excellent starting point for developing these crediting approaches.

The states that contribute to run off in the Chesapeake have been aiming to improve water quality by encouraging stream restoration and other projects, making it a source of innovation in the field. In fact, Lammers has adapted many of the methods originally developed by the Chesapeake Stormwater Network.

His project is intended specifically to help state and regional agencies set up their own crediting programs.

“This document is targeted mainly to state or regional agencies who are responsible for setting up crediting programs having to do with stream restoration,” Lammers said.

Stream restoration projects are often taken on with a lack of understanding and measurements about the possible benefits they could provide. This is due to the fact that monitoring of stream restoration projects can take extensive time and money to perform.

“We want to develop a database around performance of stream restoration projects. Currently, few of these restoration projects are monitored and it is often unclear how well they work. We want to be able to quantify how much nutrient reduction one of these stream restoration activities would cause,” Lammers said.

To combat this gap in knowledge, Lammers is setting out to create quantification methods that focus on four major types of stream restoration strategy, each with its own formula.

The first, bed and bank stabilization, helps to prevent erosion and the release of phosphorus into the stream. Lammers is able to estimate the benefits of this type of project by measuring levels of erosion before and after the project, then calculating the amount of phosphorous reduced by stopping said erosion.

Next, the creation of riparian buffers traps sediment and pollutants within natural vegetation along streams before they can reach the water. These are assessed based on the size of the buffers and estimates of how many nutrients they can remove from an area.

“Another strategy is stream enhancement, which involves putting structures in the streams like rocks, logs, or anything to stabilize the channel,” Lammers explained. “These projects are assessed by how well they improve the filtering capacity of the stream and their contribution to water quality.”

The last is floodplain reconnection, which works to make the stream channel and floodplain act as a unit to reduce erosion and improve water quality. To measure the benefits of this strategy, Lammers calculates how much water moves through the connected floodplain and how much pollution removal has been removed.

The methods and databases that Lammers is working on can connect to small, regional projects but also to wider goals as well, having to do with policy and large-scale water quality standards.

When it comes to the Chesapeake Bay region, these four quantification methods, as well as others, are being incorporated to understand the best ways the area can reduce their excess nutrient levels. There are many other potential benefits of stream restoration besides than nutrient reduction that Lammers is not focusing on but finds important, such as benefits for fish, animals, flooding, insects, recreation, and more.

“This information can also provide a platform for water quality trading programs. We want to know how we can create a marketplace to encourage the most effective ways of improving water quality. For example, if a wastewater treatment plant is unable meet EPA limits on the amount of nutrients they can discharge, it may be cheaper for them to pay for stream restoration projects that could result in improved water quality in a more efficient way, rather than installing expensive upgrades at their facility,” Lammers said.

This work was made possible thanks to the Water Research Foundation.

We are now accepting proposals from graduate students for the 2021 John Spencer Research Grants program!

The UGA River Basin Center announces the 2021 call for proposals for John Spencer Research Grants to graduate students. This program was initiated in 2017 with a contribution from Kathelen Amos in honor of her son, former RBC master’s student John Spencer. Ongoing funding is provided by donations to the RBC.

Small grants are available to all students affiliated with the River Basin Center. Affiliate status is open to any graduate student at the University of Georgia, including those in professional programs, as long as their research and/or interests align with the RBC mission, which is to connect water-related research at UGA with societal management and policy needs. Students can request affiliate status by emailing Sarah Buckleitner at Sarah.Buckleitner@uga.edu. This can be done concurrent with submitting a proposal. Small grants are intended to support a student’s research activities. Projects should advance the RBC’s goal of sustainable management of aquatic resources and ecosystems, but can be in any discipline or disciplines. Funds can be used for research supplies, travel expenses associated with research, hourly wages for undergraduate research assistants and graduate stipends. Travel to conferences may be included, but conference travel funding must be limited to $1000.

Proposal Format (2 page limit, exclusive of budget and references):

Title of proposal

Applicant’s name, email address, department, degree program

Introduction, problem statement, and research question(s) to be tested. Applicants should emphasize the work to be funded by the proposal, but also explain how it fits into the broader context of their thesis, dissertation, or other project, as appropriate. Research questions should be specific and the scope should be appropriate to the scale of the project.

Research plan and methods: Be specific but concise.

Budget with justification

Budgets cannot exceed $2000. If the proposed work requires a budget greater than the limit, briefly explain what other funds will be used to complete the work.

References

Proposals must be accompanied by a brief (one page limit; one paragraph is sufficient) endorsement from the applicant’s advisor or other faculty sponsor of the work.

Proposals for 2021 are due April 23, 2021. Decisions will be announced 2 weeks later, and funding will be made available shortly thereafter. Funds will need to be spent by June 30, 2022, unless special arrangements are made.

Proposals should be submitted as a single PDF file to Sarah Buckleitner at Sarah.Buckleitner@uga.edu by midnight eastern on April 23, 2021.

Proposals will be evaluated by volunteer faculty affiliates of the RBC who have no conflicts of interest with applicants. Proposals will be evaluated both on quality of the project (potential contribution of the proposed work and relevance to the RBC’s mission) as well as quality of the proposal itself (i.e., how well it communicates the content and whether it includes all necessary components).

Writer: Casey Phillips

Chattanooga, Tenn. (Sept. 10, 2020) – It is the inevitable destiny of all water that falls on land to eventually return to the sea. And like an enthusiastic tourist, it can’t help but pick up souvenirs along the way, whether it’s dirt, fertilizers or — as many scientists now suspect — plastic.

In recent years, the world slowly has awoken to the, ironically, enormous impact microscopic plastic has on marine life. Every year, an average of 8.8 million tons (about 17.6 billion pounds) of plastic fragments or manufactured plastic objects measuring smaller than five millimeters across enter the ocean. There, they’re consumed by microscopic organisms and eventually work their way up the food chain to humans.

Although the bulk of plastic waste originates inland, microplastic is largely seen as a coastal issue thanks to images of plastic debris piled up on beaches or found inside marine animals. Little is known about how this plague of plastic affects the rivers, lakes and streams through which it passes on its way to the sea.

On Sept. 14, the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute hopes to make inroads to answering that question as host to a virtual workshop on freshwater microplastic research. The workshop was organized in partnership with the River Basin Center at the University of Georgia. 

Among other topics, participants in the one-day summit will focus on developing standards to ensure current and future researchers can reliably compare and build on each other’s findings.

“In a new field of research where so many different methods are being used, it is extremely important that studies are designed and conducted so we can compare and replicate results from different labs,” says Dr. Anna George, the Aquarium’s vice president of conservation science and education.

“Not only will these studies improve our understanding of how plastic pollution reaches the ocean, they will also provide insight into an emerging threat to maintaining clean water for us all.”

The workshop initially was scheduled to take place in April at the Conservation Institute’s headquarters on the banks of the Tennessee River. However, the ongoing health crisis necessitated a different approach, and it now will be held via Zoom video conference.  

Dr. Krista Capps, an assistant professor with the Odum School of Ecology and Savannah River Ecology Lab, helped organize the workshop of 50 participants. Her research into how microplastic is affected by water treatment facilities has been hampered by a lack of agreed-upon research standards.

The issues caused by this absence of structure spurred the idea for the upcoming workshop, Dr. Capps says.

“There are currently no accepted standard methodologies to collect and identify microplastic pollution, as the field is developing so quickly,” she says. “Many researchers I contacted were also frustrated by this situation. The workshop is an outgrowth of my search for expert advice and a quest to develop standard quality assurance and quality control protocols for sampling and analysis.”

The workshop participants represent a variety of institutions, including the University of Georgia, Sewanee: The University of the South, Auburn University, Mississippi State University, the University of Alabama and Vanderbilt University as well as Riverkeeper organizations, SeaGrant consortiums and government agencies.

“Plastic pollution is a problem that affects everyone,” Dr. Capps says. “The greater diversity of stakeholders and academic disciplines involved in working on this problem, the more holistic our approach to understanding plastic pollution will be.”

The workshop will feature presentations by several experts, including:

·         Dr. Rae McNeish, an assistant professor of biology at California State University, Bakersfield

·         Dr. Jeremy Conkle, an associate professor of physical and environmental science at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi

·         Dr. Andreas Fath, a professor of physical chemistry and analytics at Germany’s Furtwangen University

Dr. Fath made headlines in 2017 with a record-setting marathon swim of the entire 652-length of the Tennessee River. During this 34-day undertaking, he and his team took daily measurements of various water quality indicators, including the presence of microplastics. With data from locations along the entire course of the river, this “swim for science” represented one of the first comprehensive studies of how microplastic moves through freshwater systems.

Analysis of the project’s findings found microplastic levels in the Tennessee River that were 80 times higher than Dr. Fath detected during a similar study of Germany’s Rhine River in 2014. These results were a clear sign that microplastics have a greater, if largely uninvestigated, potential to impact freshwater sources than previously assumed, Dr. George says.

“Some freshwater-focused scientists, myself included, thought plastic in freshwater was moving out to the ocean so quickly that it probably wasn’t having a major impact on freshwater habitats or animals,” she says. “Dr. Fath’s work demonstrated that there was enough microplastic pollution in freshwater habitats that we needed to learn more about its impact in our streams and rivers.”

For more information about the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute, visit tnaqua.org/conserve. 

To learn more about the River Basin Center at the University of Georgia, visit ecology.uga.edu.

Details about Dr. Andreas Fath’s TenneSwim project are at en.rheines-wasser.eu.