What was the focus of your research?

I was looking at the effects of agricultural land use on stream biology, specifically what’s within the riparian corridor. That’s the area of land immediately adjacent to the stream, and this is important because it’s been found that the Riparian Corridor can act as a buffer to the stream ecosystem. Trees and shrubs in that riparian corridor are called riparian vegetation. When rain brings runoff with chemicals, fertilizers, pollutants, stormwater runoff, whatever, that riparian vegetation will act as a buffer and draw in those chemicals before it enters the stream. When you remove that riparian vegetation, the stream is able to get a lot more polluted a lot more quickly. I looked at two streams, both in an agricultural watershed, meaning the land that drains into those streams is predominantly agricultural. The main difference between the two streams was their riparian corridors. One of their riparian corridors was mostly agricultural and one was forested.

 

What did you look at to measure these effects? 

We looked at the differences in insect populations between the streams and what’s called benthic aquatic macroinvertebrates, which are bottom-dwelling critters, things like larval insects, or snails or clams or leeches, anything that lives on the bottom of the stream. This is important because those types of organisms present are indicative of levels of pollution. So for example, things like leeches are very pollution tolerant, so they can live in toxic sludge. So if you sample a stream and only find leeches, that’s a bio indicator that it’s a very polluted stream, whereas mayflies can only live in really clean water. So if you see a stream and find a bunch of mayflies, you can infer that there’s less pollution.

 

What did you find? 

Ultimately, we found that my agricultural riparian corridor stream had organisms indicating much higher levels of pollution. The forest stream had organisms indicating much lower levels of pollution. But what was interesting, they both had what’s called high conductivity values. Conductivity is just a measure of all the suspended material in the stream, which is a pretty rudimentary estimate for pollution because the more stuff in the water, the more polluted it is. The fact that they both had high conductivity values is showing that they both are exhibiting effects of being in agricultural land. The differences in the biology between the two streams is indicating that despite those inputs from the agricultural land, the riparian forests can still promote biodiversity and keep organisms less polluted.

 

What is the applicability of something like this?

So we can’t get rid of agriculture; our population is growing. We’ve got to feed everyone. There’s no way to eliminate farmland, so what’s important is to pursue means to mitigate the negative effects of agriculture without actually removing agriculture. What’s great about this is that this supports research that the riparian corridor is more important or plays a greater impact on the health of a stream than necessarily the watershed. For agricultural streams, you can take very relatively small measures such as planting trees and shrubs directly on the stream bank without removing much land for farming and still help the stream biodiversity quite a bit.

 

How did you come up with this idea? What made you want to pursue this research? 

“I actually came up with a study site first. I really wanted to work near Walloon Lake. I wanted just to design a project, but one I could do there. The other thing I knew is that I wanted to do a project with stream biology because I’ve already worked with rivers and lakes, but not yet streams. So I just went onto Google Earth and found streams near Walloon Lake. Based on the streams that I found and the similarities between them, that’s how I came up with the idea for a comparative study. 

 

Did you have any professorial input or any specific advisers that were really good at helping this? 

“Dr. Houghton was my thesis advisor, and it was really great. I was kind of in a unique position to be conducting my research off campus. I was actually working part time at a summer camp while I did my research, so he was great throughout the entire process. It was his idea to look at adult insects and not just benthic aquatic macroinvertebrates, so that doubled the data of my study.”

 

What are you planning on doing post graduation? How does this research at all relate to it?

“I am hoping to go into fisheries and wildlife. I’m pretty flexible with exactly what I do, but my thesis research in addition to past internship experiences and  experiences outdoors as a kid has really increased my passion for freshwater specifically. I’m trying to focus my job search on the Great Lakes area, or working with streams or wetlands in need of restoration.

 

Why are you motivated to go into this field? Why do you think it’s important?

“A lot of it is just a passion for the outdoors. I used to be at the pre-health sciences track until I took a general ecology course and realized that I was really interested in working to protect our natural resources – not only to protect freshwater systems for the sake of biodiversity, but also for human health and consumption. Especially with recent events, like the East Palestine train derailments, it’s a really developing field with lots of new opportunities. As our population grows, the demands on the earth are more important, but I think it’s important to sustain human life, but at the same time, to try to protect our resources.”