Category: The Center

Getting into Soil and Water 2020

Artists are not usually the first people who spring to mind when thinking about soil conservation in the United States. In the 1950s and 60s however, Felix Summers’ artwork introduced the Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service) and big ideas about conservation farming to thousands of Americans. Even if they did not know his name, rural communities knew Felix Summers’ vivid, one-panel cartoons pointing out the dangers of soil erosion and the value of conservation farming.

In the mid-20th century, the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) used a team of technical illustrators in the Information Office to bring SCS ideas and publications to life. Professional artists illustrated complex scientific and engineering concepts not easily conveyed in text or photography. The tremendous number of informational bulletins, pamphlets, and other materials that flowed from the SCS in the mid-20th century often featured the work of these in-house illustrators. While most of their work illustrated specific manuals, guides, and public-facing pamphlets, the Information Division also provided a constantly expanding catalog of conservation cartoons to field offices. Field office staff across the country published the cartoons that best addressed local issues in local newspapers. These cartoons were many Americans’ first introduction to the SCS and conservation agriculture. Most of the over 400 cartoons in the artwork catalog were the work of one illustrator, Felix Summers.

Making His Way to the SCS

Felix Summers came to the SCS by way of two very different places: the New York City art scene of the 1930s and the Mills County Iowa SCS office. He began his art career at the University of Nebraska and went on to do post-graduate work at Yale, where he studied with muralist Eugene Savage. Summers’ style reflected the contemporary influence of the Regionalist school made famous by other Midwestern artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood. Iowan farmers since before the Civil War, Summers’ family was steeped in agriculture. His rural upbringing outside of Strahan, Iowa informed his artistic focus on scenes of agrarian and rural life. Despite his rural roots, Summers spent five years painting murals in decidedly non- rural Manhattan department stores and nightclubs, including the storied Cotton Club and the El Morocco. World War II deferred Summers’ early artistic career as a muralist when the Army drafted him to serve with the combat engineers. After the war, the art world’s tastes moved away from Summers’ agrarian Regionalism – rejecting the familiar, rural scenes that were his specialty.

Nutrient pollution in surface waters – or eutrophication – is a grave social and economic concern for communities across Iowa. Over 90 percent of Iowa lakes and reservoirs are characterized as eutrophic due to very high nutrient levels (IDNR, AQuIA Database, Carlson, 1977). This means that our lakes are vulnerable to algal blooms during the summer months (Figure 1). Algal blooms are one of the most visible and dangerous symptoms of eutrophication as these blooms are linked to concerns such as fish kills and the release of toxins (Smith, 2009).

During the summer of 2018, researchers with the Ambient Lake Monitoring Program found the toxin microcystin in 72 percent of their 128 study lakes across Iowa (IDNR, AQuIA Database). Microcystin is a liver toxin that may be produced during algal blooms by some types of cyanobacteria, commonly called blue-green algae. Exposure to this toxin can cause skin irritation, gastrointestinal distress, and liver damage (Carmichael, 2001). Toxic algal blooms are an obvious public health concern, and they jeopardize the recreational economies of Iowa’s water bodies – an industry valued at around $1 billion statewide, annually (Jeon et al., 2016). As such, there is a pressing need to manage algal blooms in order to protect public health and recreational economies across our state.

Managing Inputs

Preventing algal blooms requires that we reduce nutrient inputs to Iowa surface waters. For lakes and reservoirs, it is especially important to manage phosphorus inputs. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for all organisms. However, high phosphorus levels in lakes can be “too much of a good thing,” and fuel algal blooms dominated by cyanobacteria (Schindler et al., 2016). Lake phosphorus management typically focuses on reducing watershed phosphorus losses with practices such as cover crops and buffer strips. These efforts are critical for eutrophication management; however, it is also important to consider how phosphorus can be recycled within water bodies. Specifically, phosphorus stored in the sediments at the bottom of a lake can be released into the overlying water if the sediments are disturbed or if chemical conditions change (Søndergaard et al. 2003). This process is referred to as internal phosphorus loading and can maintain high, in-lake phosphorus concentrations even if watershed nutrient inputs are reduced, perpetuating poor water quality (Jeppesen et al., 2005).

Unfortunately, the mechanisms that control internal phosphorus loading are poorly described for the shallow lakes and reservoirs that we have in Iowa. This knowledge gap makes the management of internal phosphorus inputs extremely difficult. How can you prevent something if you don’t know when, where, or why it’s happening? The goal of my graduate research with the Wilkinson Limnology Lab at Iowa State University is to start answering the “when, where, and why” of internal phosphorus loading in shallow lakes. With funding support from the Iowa Water Center, we constructed a sediment core incubation system to measure internal phosphorus loads in Iowa lakes and test the underlying mechanisms (Figure 2). Over the course of last summer, our research team visited several study lakes in western Iowa and collected cores of lakebed sediments and the overlying water. We took these cores back to the laboratory and incubated them under different conditions that lakebed sediments might experience naturally, such as low versus high oxygen levels. Every day the cores were incubated, we collected samples of the overlying water and tested the phosphorus concentration. This measurement allowed us to determine if the sediments were releasing phosphorus over time and if so, how much.

Investigating Mechanisms

Preliminary results from the past summer indicate moderate to high internal phosphorus loading rates in our study lakes. The influence of oxygen levels on sediment phosphorus release varied across different study lakes and between shallow versus deep sites within each lake. Next year, we will continue to investigate the chemical mechanisms responsible for the observed patterns. Testing the mechanisms that control sediment phosphorus release can inform targeted management approaches to reduce internal loading. It is important to note that efforts to reduce internal phosphorus loading will only be effective if watershed inputs are also controlled. Addressing eutrophication in Iowa water bodies requires bold management of both external and internal phosphorus loading.

 

Ellen Albright

Graduate Research Assistant Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology at Iowa State University

References:

Carlson, R.E. 1977. A trophic state index for lakes. Limnology and Oceanography, 22(2): 361-369.

Carmichael, W.W. 2001. Health effects of toxin-producing cyanobacteria: “The CyanoHABs”. Human Ecological Risk Assessment, 7(5): 1393-1407.

Iowa Department of Natural Resources (IDNR). 2018. Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment Section. AQuIA [database]. Retrieved from https://programs. iowadnr.gov/aquia/.

Jeon, H., Ji, Y., and Kling, C.L. 2016. A report to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources: The Iowa Lakes Valuation Project 2014. Prepared February 2016, URL: http://www.card.iastate.edu/lakes/report-to-the-iowa-department-of- natural-resources-2014.pdf

Jeppesen, E., Sondergaard, M., Jensen, J.P., Havens, K.E., Anneville, O., Carvalho, L., et al. 2005. Lake responses to reduced nutrient loading — an analysis of contemporary long-term data from 35 case studies. Freshwater Biology, 50(10): 1747–1771.

Schindler, D.W., Carpenter, S.R., Chapra, S.C., Hecky R.E., and Orihel,
D.M. 2016. Reducing phosphorus to curb lake eutrophication is a success. Environmental Science & Technology, 50(17): 8923-8929.

Smith, Val H. 2009. “Eutrophication.” In The Encyclopedia of Inland Waters, edited by Gene E. Likens, 61-73. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Søndergaard, M., Jensen, J.P., and Jeppesen, E. 2003. Role of sediment and internal loading of phosphorus in shallow lakes. Hydrobiologia, 506-509: 135- 145.

For the past four summers, Iowa State University’s College of Design Associate Professor Alex Braidwood has been teaching a field study class at Iowa Lakeside Lab Regents Resource Center called Acoustic Ecology. Lakeside Lab is a biological field research station in the northwest corner of Iowa founded in 1909 with the stated goal of providing a place for “the study of nature in nature.” This mission continues to this day. As part of this mission, the Acoustic Ecology course that Braidwood has developed brings together undergraduate and graduate students from the sciences and the arts each summer

to investigate the soundscape of Lakeside Lab and the surrounding areas. The region is dotted with prairie, wetland, and even woodland preserves where Braidwood both collects audio for his own work and exposes students to the process of nature sound recording during the two-week, two credit course.

The Acoustic Ecology class is a dynamic field study experience that involves a great deal of work in the field to put into practice the things that are discussed and demonstrated in the classroom. The course also involves a series of listening exercises to get everyone familiar and comfortable with the idea of active listening, a skill anyone can spend more time working on. The group moves through various exercises, some stationary and some mobile, to regain a level of focus on their ears and on listening – not just hearing, but listening. Hearing is the mechanical action performed by the ear and its subsequent parts. Listening, however, is much different. Listening involves the mind and has a level of intention to it that is not necessarily present in hearing. Listening is also a skill that can be improved upon.

These types of experiences provide an introduction into the lessons that will follow over the two-week class and are reinforced throughout the coursework. The class is part seminar, part field study, part technical demonstration, and part studio/lab. Students are shown early in the course a variety of audio recording techniques as well as taught how to use different sound recording devices and microphone configurations. The benefits of different recording systems and tactics are discussed, and students are given time to practice in the field as the class takes exploratory trips to various locations. The goal of the trips is also to determine sites and specific locations for capturing early morning recordings that begin pre-dawn and continue after sunset. This time of wildlife vocalization is referred to as the “dawn chorus” and is one of the more dynamic times for capturing an acoustic signature of a given place. After bringing the various field recordings back to the lab, the sounds are analyzed, processed, marked up, and observed. Students make observations about species diversity, uniqueness of the environment, impact of human sound, and anything else they find relevant for discussion.

In addition to recording techniques and equipment, the course covers a variety of professional audio editing and mastering techniques for the creation of audio pieces to be shared online. The end result is project-based and completed in the form of narrative audio pieces edited together to tell the story of what has been collected and observed. These audio pieces are in an audio format similar to popular edited podcasts such as RadioLab, 99 Percent Invisible, and This American Life.

Coming up on this incredible achievement moves one to reflect thoughtfully on the past and, as the ninth CEO of the Society, I am compelled to set a course for the future. With the world around us changing at an unprecedented pace, it is hard to predict what the Society and the conservation profession will look like in the next 75 years but I know it will include the Soil and Water Conservation Society as an inclusive and dexterous organization ready to respond to the needs of our members and our natural resources.

Towards this goal of inclusion, the Society started as, and remains today, one of very few interdisciplinary professional associations. As Hugh Hammond Bennett, founder of the Society and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, wrote seventy five years ago in the first edition of our Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, “For efficient forward movement of the national program of soil and water conservation…there will always be a need for well-trained specialists. There will always be a need for agronomists, geologists, engineers, foresters, botanists, hydrologists, and others…teachers, industrialists, students, doctors, union members, ministers, bankers, editors and farmers – people in every walk of life.”