This article appears courtesy RCN partner KY Forward via Discover Magazine and is written by Bob Driehaus.
A conservationist might have surveyed the polluted Ohio and Licking rivers 30 years ago and despaired. Decades of heavy industrial dumping had combined with the discharge of raw sewage to leave the rivers in distress.
The same conservationist might look today and wonder if the problem is intractable. Sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff still pour into the rivers untreated. Hopeless? No. But improvement takes time. And it takes research, carefully conducted to pinpoint the effects of modern life on water quality, plant life and animal life. Northern Kentucky University professors, often with students at their side, have been hard at work on that task. Workable solutions are emerging to put the goal of cleaner, recreation-friendly rivers within reach.
Hand-in-hand is an effort to teach future scientists – whether they are in the first grade or college today – to continue the work tomorrow.
Dr. Kristy Hopfensperger, assistant professor of biological sciences, studies nitrogen pollution in the Licking, comparing concentrations at different points along the river between Butler, Ky., and the Licking’s terminus at the Ohio. Nitrogen, a key ingredient in crop and lawn fertilizers, can launch a chain of events that result in dead zones in the river.
Nitrogen encourages abnormally fast algae growth. When the algae die, other organisms break down the plant matter and consume oxygen that fish, insects and other fauna and plants need to survive. The problem is not new, but Hopfensperger’s research suggests it is also not insurmountable. Even a thin strip of soil along the river can accommodate microbes to feast on the nitrogen that is headed toward the water from homes and businesses.
“If a city area is going to have a lot more impervious pavement, it’s important to have the riparian systems to remove nitrogen before it enters the waterways,” Hopfensperger said.
At another site, she and her colleagues are using a federal Environmental Protection Agency grant to conduct research in Boone County that sets out to measure how much nitrogen is running off parking lots and other pavement into storm-water retention areas and other wetlands. They also are trying to identify the plants and soil conditions that are most effective in removing the nitrogen. The EPA hopes to apply nationally what the NKU team finds out locally.
Hopfensperger’s work is just a part of NKU’s focus on the complex and fascinating business of identifying pollutants and other enemies of healthy waterways. The tadpole and its archenemy, invasive honeysuckle, are the subjects of research by Dr. Richard Durtsche and Dr. Richard Boyce, both assistant professors of biology. Their testing ground is the St. Anne Wetland, a 100-acre site in Melbourne, six miles east of campus and across the road from the Ohio River.
At St. Anne’s and throughout the region, Amur honeysuckle, an export from China, is crowding native vegetation. Its leaves emerge early and shed late, hogging sunlight from competitors. And Durtsche and Boyce have documented an even more sinister trick up the honeysuckle’s sleeve: It poisons its neighbors.
A chemical compound in the honeysuckle’s leaves disperses in the soil around it, acting as herbicide to its would be competitors. The damage from those chemicals spreads to the water as well. Durtsche and his students have studied the effects of the honeysuckle leaves on the development of tadpoles and adult frogs, grinding up honeysuckle leaves and native plant leaves into sort of tea in which the tadpoles’ development can be observed.
“Honeysuckle is really flooding the aquatic system with these chemicals,” Durtsche said. “When at 1 gram of dry leaf matter per liter of water, it kills most of the tadpoles.”
The survivors grow into froglets that jump shorter distances than their counterparts and tire more easily, compromising their ability to escape predators. Durtsche and his students also found that decaying honeysuckle leaves are consumed by bacteria that use more oxygen in the water than the bacteria that eat native plants, creating another instance of oxygen-starved water that depresses fish and other wildlife populations.
Boyce, meanwhile, determined that honeysuckle consumes roughly 10 percent more water than the native species it supplants.
“Ephemeral ponds that are there in spring but dry out in summer are essential to tadpoles because there are no fish predators,” he said. “But honeysuckle makes ponds dry out more quickly.” The change is a big one for frogs, which rely on ephemeral ponds to lay their eggs and develop their tadpoles. If those ponds dry up more quickly, frog populations suffer.
The fight against the spread of honeysuckle may be getting an assist from Mother Nature in the form of blight that eats the plant’s leaves. Boyce said the blight was more prevalent in 2012 than in past years. But the slow course of evolution won’t fix the problem quickly enough, so Boyce, Durtsche and others are working on mitigation.
“It’s here to stay,” Boyce said. “The question is can we figure out a way to make it less of a thug than it is.”
While much of the waterway research by NKU students and faculty targets specific problems, Dr. Miriam Steinitz Kannan’s work involves the bigger picture. She, her students and their community partners monitor the Ohio River’s overall health. Steinitz Kannan, an NKU Regents Professor in the department of biological sciences, has partnered with the EPA, ORSANCO (the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission), several water departments and other universities during her three decades of studying the Ohio River. She has helped create an index for RSANCO to identify algae found in the region’s water sources and what their presence or absence means for the water’s health.
“Certain species indicate if there are large amounts of organic matter in the water. Others indicate low oxygen levels or high concentrations of nitrogen,” she said.
Her many other field experiments include tracking algae in ponds, including a recent expedition with her students dubbed a “pond scum field day.” Before that, Steinitz Kannan’s sleuthing helped the Wyoming, Ohio, water department identify the source of its water’s temporary purple hue – a harmless bacteria, she was glad to report.
Years of improved stewardship have paid off for the Ohio River and its tributaries, Steinitz Kannan said. “The river is in good shape. I’ve been working on it for 30 years, and it’s getting better and better. We have periods of time when we have algae blooms or something, but the quality of the water, the diversity of fish, it’s all improved,” she said.
Steinitz Kannan credits a reduction in which, in rainy periods, deliver untreated sewage directly into the Ohio and Licking rivers. Other mitigation is working, too. She cites the Sanitation District No. 1’s program to encourage rain gardens.
It takes more than a few professors and their students to tackle big environmental challenges. To that end, professors like Steinitz Kannan, who conducts a summer science camp, and Dr. Steve Kerlin, director of NKU’s Center for Environmental Education, are enlisting children and their teachers in the effort to better understand the ecology of the waterways.
Last June, a group of elementary and high school students enrolled in a Center for Environmental Education course that involved a weeklong canoe and kayak trip up the Licking River. The idea is simple: Teach the teachers, and they’ll teach the children. As they paddled the river, the teachers stopped to collect biological samples since what is found living in the water is a gauge of the pollution – or lack of it.
“Some species can live in all kinds of water. Others can only live in good quality water,” explained Kerlin. “We look for diversity of species, a bioindicator that water quality is fairly good. If we’re finding the larva of leeches and bloodworms, and not finding mayflies, it’s likely poor quality. Once we know that, we can look for other indicators to find exactly what’s wrong.”
The center also works with Boone County High School students at Gunpowder Creek, an Ohio River feeder stream, introducing them to ways to measure a waterway’s health. Community programs, participation in World Monitoring Day in October and other events with younger students round out the center’s outreach activities. The goal, Kerlin said, is to raise awareness of local environmental issues while also guiding participants to make informed decisions about conservation and mitigation.
Such efforts are intrinsic to NKU’s mission, said Dr. Jan Hillard, associate provost for research, graduate studies and regional stewardship. NKU, he said, takes a particular interest in elevating student interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics or, as they are often called, the STEM fields. But, he added, scientists are not the only NKU faculty contributing to the discussion of the region’s water ecology. Expertise in literature, informatics, art, music and history also offer a connection to ecology and the river, and Hillard is looking for new ways to connect those disciplines even more so in the future. There could, for example, be a writing retreat with the river as the subject of essays and poetry.
“The driving emphasis rests upon the value of bringing these resources together with the opportunity to leverage NKU’s expertise to new initiatives and opportunities,” Hillard said.
Bob Driehaus is a freelance writer based in Cincinnati. This story originally appeared in Discover, a magazine published annually by Northern Kentucky University to spotlight faculty research and creativity at NKU. You can read the full 2012-2013 issue of Discover here.
PHOTO: Researchers from Northern Kentucky University work across disciplines to find solutions for river pollution./Discover Magazine