The Freshwater Collaborative Steering Committee will meet Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025, from Noon-1:30 p.m. via Zoom.
Farming is a vital part of Wisconsin’s economy, and agricultural practices significantly impact the state’s water resources. The Ag-Water Nexus Seminar and Ag-Water Nexus Field Experience equip students with a broad, interdisciplinary education that integrates agricultural and environmental perspectives.
The courses rotate among four universities, allowing students to explore different agricultural areas in Wisconsin. The spring 2026 offering is based at UW-Platteville. The fall 2026 offering will be at UW-Green Bay.
These courses are funded by the Freshwater Collaborative and are offered by the Wisconsin Ag-Water Nexus, a collaboration of faculty from UW-Green Bay, UW-Platteville, UW-River Falls and UW-Stevens Point. Students must be enrolled at one of the four universities.
Seminar: Highlights current research and applied projects addressing Wisconsin’s agricultural water issues. Students engage with leading faculty, graduate students, and professionals through guest lectures, discussions, and online reflections. This is an online synchronous/asynchronous one-credit course.
Field Experience: Immerses students in Wisconsin’s agricultural regions to examine the relationship between farming practices and water resource management. Over the course of a three-day field experience, students engage in site visits to local farms and agricultural cooperatives, hands-on labs, and conversations with researchers, conservationists, and producers. They build practical skills, foster professional connections, and gain deeper understanding of the real-world challenges and solutions at the agriculture–water interface. This is a one-credit in-person course held May 1-3, 2026.
To learn more and enroll in the course, students should contact their campus Ag-Water Nexus coordinator:
Enrollment capacity will be limited:
Here’s what previous participants say about the courses:
“To summarize the Ag-Water field experience in a single phrase: collaboration at every level from the scientists in the lab to the farmers in the fields, to the educators who showed it to us all. At every stop, this trip confirmed how vast the systems are in the agroecological world. And then, given that this class was focused on water, further explanation was then given on how water was related to these systems.” — UW-Platteville student
“The wide variety of places we got the opportunity to visit on this field trip was amazing. Each stop differed from the rest and presented something new to expand upon and learn about. My favorite stop was the Blue River Stream Restoration Site and Big Spring. I have a restoration emphasis at UWRF so this was particularly interesting to me and pertained directly to my future career.” — UW-River Falls student
“Overall, I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in this field experience. I saw many things that were insightful about agricultural practices and how they are managed in a way to try and protect the environment as best as can be done in a financially feasible way.” — UW-Green Bay student
Never fall in the water while wearing waders! That’s one of the many lessons Abby Panier, a UW-Whitewater undergraduate student, learned last summer.
Panier worked as a beach monitoring intern with UW Oshkosh, based in Manitowoc, Wisc. She collected daily water samples from 13 public beaches to evaluate recreational water safety. She tested the samples at the County Health Department. If levels of E. coli and other bacteria were too high, she put up advisories to close the beach for the day.
Her most memorable experience happened after a big storm.
“The shoreline was severely altered so it was almost unrecognizable,” she says. “I waded into Lake Michigan to take my samples, but misjudged where the drop-off was, and proceeded to fall flat on my face amid three-foot waves.”
Luckily, Panier’s survival instincts kicked in, and she made it back to shore — soaked but safe. It was a good lesson that things don’t always go as planned when working in the field.
Some skills can only be learned outside the classroom. Funding from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin, and others, allows UW Oshkosh to leverage its Environmental Research and Innovation Center (ERIC) to provide hands-on paid summer opportunities to undergraduates throughout the state.
Greg Kleinheinz, director of the ERIC and principal investigator on the Freshwater Collaborative grant, says students gain hands-on and applied skills related to water testing and analysis. The real-world internships teach students more than technical skills.
“Students gain critical thinking and problem-solving skills as they work through situations that don’t happen in a traditional classroom,” Kleinheinz says.
Case in point? Figuring out how to maneuver through three-foot waves on Lake Michigan while wearing waders.
During the 2024-25 academic year, 52 undergraduate students from 11 of the Universities of Wisconsin participated in undergraduate research and internships through UW Oshkosh’s ERIC lab.
Interns participate in a wide range of water-related services. These include
In addition to monitoring beach conditions, Panier conducted annual beach surveys for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, analyzed drinking water samples from local businesses, and recorded algal blooms and collected weekly samples to test for toxic algae.
She also learned to use a “Bebot” (beach robot) and “Pixie Drone” (water robot). This was part of a collaboration with the Great Lakes Plastic Clean Up, which involved taking the robots to beaches to collect plastic and outreach events at Meijer grocery stores to educate the public about plastic pollution.
Alyssa Arch, an undergraduate at UW-Madison, participated in similar activities as one of five field research interns working in Door County. Her team collected daily samples from Door County beaches and analyzed the results at a UW Oshkosh lab in Sturgeon Bay. She oversaw quality control in the lab and led a data project designed to evaluate the historical rates of closures and advisories of the public beaches in Door County.
“My favorite experience was anytime we got to do stream water sampling with the Soil and Water Conservation Department because it gave me something new to learn,” she says. “It’s a field of water research I’m interested in, so it gave me insight as to what a future job may look like.”
In addition to technical skills, Arch says her internship enhanced her customer service skills. The lab is open to community members who bring in well water samples for testing. She learned a lot about effectively communicating with the public — a skill that will come in handy in her future career.
“I’d love to be doing some kind of freshwater research or monitoring while being able to incorporate citizen science or the community in some way,” Arch says. “This internship got me started. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for a job, but it became clear to me as the summer went on.”
Learn about summer water internships and research opportunities.
Oconomowoc native Sam Krueger says the term “research” can be intimidating. Participating in the Freshwater@UW Summer Research Opportunities program showed her research can be fun and accessible. It also took away the intimidation factor in applying to graduate school.
Krueger graduated from UW-Whitewater with a bachelor’s degree in geography with a minor in chemistry in 2024. She is now in her second year of graduate school at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.
“The Freshwater@UW program nudged me toward graduate school,” she says.
She adds that participating in undergraduate research gave her more confidence working in the lab. She became more comfortable asking questions of faculty and graduate students.
Gaining practical skills and confidence is an overarching goal of Freshwater@UW, which is funded by the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Sea Grant, the UW Water Resources Institute and Water@UW-Madison. The program is currently accepting applications for the 2026 cohort.
Krueger participated in 2023 because she was interested in learning about hydrogeology. She was assigned to a project with Michael Cardiff, a professor at UW-Madison. She worked with Cardiff and his graduate students to create a geophysical field campaign to assess groundwater recharge rates in rural Wisconsin.
The summer project provided hands-on field experience — and solidified Krueger’s desire to work in water-related research.
“The Freshwater@UW program is a great chance for interested undergraduates to ‘get into the weeds’ of a water problem and try their hand at research,” Cardiff says. “It’s been great to see Sam’s excitement for water science continue as part of her graduate work at UW-Milwaukee.”
After catching the research bug, Krueger spent part of her senior year conducting research on the toxicity of neonicotinoids, insecticides widely used for crop protection. She worked with Elisabeth Harrahy, an associate professor at UW-Whitewater specializing in environmental toxicology and a member of the Freshwater Collaborative steering committee.
Harrahy’s mentorship along with graduate school information provided during the Freshwater@UW program guided Krueger to graduate school at UW-Milwaukee. She now works in Laodong Guo’s biogeochemistry lab at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences.
Guo says Krueger demonstrated a strong foundation in collaborative and interdisciplinary research from her Freshwater@UW experience and working as an undergraduate student technician.
“She quickly learned skills to investigate the behavior of PFAS and other contaminants in aquatic ecosystems,” he says. “The program clearly helped her build confidence in her research abilities and develop comfort working through the scientific process, making her a valued member of the lab.”
As a graduate student, Krueger conducts a range of research investigating microplastics, PFAS and heavy metals in Milwaukee Harbor and Green Bay sediments. In the past year, she has presented her research at numerous conferences, including the Society for Freshwater Sciences annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico; the American Chemical Society Great Lakes regional meeting in Appleton, Wisc.; and the International Association for Great Lakes Research in Milwaukee.
“The program is amazing. The fields of study at the school are very diverse,” she says. “Because you are on the lake, you can see the immediate results of the research happening. You feel part of a big picture.”
Krueger has enjoyed studying emerging contaminants. She would like to work for a government agency, such as the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, when she graduates in May 2026. Her current research has also piqued her interest in drinking water treatment and wastewater monitoring.
Learn more about the Freshwater@UW Summer Research Opportunities Program. The deadline to apply is Feb. 15, 2026.
Written by Heidi Jeter, Freshwater Collaborative.
Krueger explains her research in the video below.
Andrew Malacara raves about “Bug Camp,” the informal name for training workshops that are part of a new project funded by the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin.
Malacara is one of six students from UW-Parkside, UW-Stevens Point and UW-Madison who are participating in BenthicNet. The training program includes experts from the three universities as well as the Milwaukee Public Museum. They aim to expand access to collections of insects and other invertebrates that are used for biomonitoring.
Biomonitoring is the practice of analyzing changes in the numbers and types of benthic macroinvertebrates to assess water health/quality. Biomonitoring tools first developed in Wisconsin are now used globally.
Each of the institutions involved has a reference collection of benthic specimens gathered over decades. The collections hold a wealth of historical knowledge that most people, even researchers, aren’t aware exists.
Jessica Orlofske, an associate professor at UW-Parkside, envisioned BenthicNet to make the collections more accessible and to train students in collection and preservation techniques. Over the next year, students and faculty will create an online digital database that includes all the collections. The long-term goal is a resource that allows anyone in the state or the world to access the data. The database will be particularly useful for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and for community science participants.
“Regulatory agencies, such as the WDNR, can use the information to designate certain rivers for particular management practices and to prioritize their water quality sampling,” says Orlofske, who leads the project. “We are making the data they collect more informative and accessible, so they can answer questions about long-term trends.”
In addition to digitizing existing collections, students are learning how to collect and preserve new specimens. Throughout the academic year, students will participate in four hands-on weekend training workshops. The first took place at Treehaven, a public nonprofit field station operated by UW-Stevens Point. Additional workshops will take place on the UW-Madison and UW-Stevens Point campuses and at the Milwaukee Public Museum.
For Malacara, the experience thus far has been wildly fun and extremely beneficial to his career goals. He is majoring in applied mathematics and general biology and has a keen interest in entomology, the study of bugs.
His goal for the first workshop was to find a stonefly, an aquatic insect not well represented in the current specimen collections. He and Cole Kupsch, a UW-Madison student, found the first of many while surveying the Wisconsin River.
“We were a distance away from everyone, but I screamed at the top of my lungs, ‘We found a stonefly,’ unable to hold my excitement,” Malacara says. He adds that the best part of working with the other campuses has been finding people who share similar interests and passion.
Skylar Johnston, a graduate student from UW-Parkside, agrees. She is interested in museum work and joined BenthicNet to expand her understanding of collecting, identifying and processing aquatic specimens. Connecting with others who share her enthusiasm has been a huge plus.
“I have loved watching everyone become thrilled when they find certain macroinvertebrates in their samples. It was doubly exciting for me to hear everyone else just as excited as I was to find someone new or big in their nets — and even better getting to see the bugs they found,” she says. “I learned so much in just one weekend!”
Seeing such enthusiasm about entomology brings Orlofske tremendous joy. She notes that although Wisconsin was once the leader in biomonitoring, many laboratory specialists are nearing retirement age. By training a new generation, Orlofske hopes to contribute to a resurgence of expertise in Wisconsin — and for experts in other parts of the country to once again see Wisconsin as a leader in this type of water quality research.
“Bugs are a gateway to studying other aspects of freshwater. They can lead to jobs that little kids dream of doing, but students often don’t know these are real jobs,” she says. “This work expands their appreciation of careers that involve water or bugs.”
Read more about the students in Student Q&A: BenthicNet
Written by Heidi Jeter, Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin
Students from UW-Parkside, UW-Stevens Point and UW-Madison are participating in BenthicNet. The training program includes experts from the three universities as well as the Milwaukee Public Museum. They aim to expand access to collections of insects and other invertebrates that are used for biomonitoring.
Read more about the project in BenthicNet: How an Aquatic Insect Project Is Revitalizing Biomonitoring in Wisconsin
Two of the interns shared their recent experience at the first training weekend at Treehaven in September 2025.
Why were you interested in joining this project?
Johnston: I am very interested in museum digitization/curation of specimens and how we can use them for research and outreach. I am also interested in aquatic macroinvertebrates and biomonitoring samples and how we can best use that data in our collections and research.
Malacara: I was interested in this project for a few reasons. Firstly, I had been working under Dr. O. (Jessica Orlofske) as an independent study student for three months and had a great time doing so, making it easy to say yes to a project she was leading. The project itself was a golden opportunity for me. I have an interest in entomology and was looking for any opportunity I could get to learn more about the subject.
What skills have your gained or do you hope to gain?
Johnston: So far, I have expanded my understanding of where to find certain macroinvertebrates in water ecosystems. I would love to keep expanding that so that I am able to understand what macroinvertebrates I can expect to find in those ecosystems and what their presence/absence could tell us from a biomonitoring standpoint. I also want to be able to identify macroinvertebrates to a lower taxa level than I can right now. Being able to identify many of them to genus would be a (very ambitious) dream come true!!
Malacara: We’re still early in the project, but so far, I have worked with a multitude of surveying equipment across various aquatic habitats, learning hands on what works best for which environment. My understanding of the classification of aquatic insects and other aquatic invertebrates has steadily improved since the start of this project. As for things to come, we are having a workshop in Madison where we will learn more about how best to preserve specimens along with proper museum curation.
What has been your favorite or most memorable experience so far?
Johnston: There isn’t one singular moment, but rather the repeated excitement from faculty and students bringing back their sampling gear and finding new or exciting macroinvertebrates. The water systems we sampled on this trip had different macroinvertebrates than the ones in the rivers I regularly sample, so seeing new taxa was so exciting. It was doubly exciting to hear everyone else just as excited as I was to find someone new or big in their nets too (and even better getting to see the bugs they found!).
Malacara: My favorite memory so far is from our first workshop in Treehaven. I had a goal of finding a stonefly, an aquatic insect that we didn’t have many of in our collection. While surveying the Wisconsin River, Cole, a Madison student, and I found one! We were a distance away from everyone, but I screamed at the top of my lungs, “WE FOUND A STONEFLY,” unable to hold my excitement. Little did I know they had already found a few stoneflies, and Coel and I did go on to find around 20 more, but the excitement of that first one will stick with me forever.
What have you enjoyed about working with faculty and students from another university?
Johnston: Every person brings different passions and experiences to this project, and I also think it a project where people are growing new passions. I have loved watching everyone become thrilled when they find certain macroinvertebrates in their sample. I have enjoyed the faculty helping me expand my entomological and water ecosystem knowledge. I have loved being able to sit with faculty who are experts in this field and have the specimens in front of me in the river so they can point out adaptations the macroinvertebrates have to live in these areas and then how they go about identifying them in the lab. I feel like I learned SO MUCH in just one weekend!!!
Malacara: The best part of working with the other campuses is finding people who share an interest and a passion with you, learning more about their favorites, and gabbing about yours. It’s really just nice finding your people!
How do you think this experience help you attain your career goals?
Johnston: A career path I am very interested in is in museum work. I would love to expand my understanding of collecting, identifying, processing, and then connecting other researchers to museum material. This project feels very close to what I would love to see as a larger stronger network across Wisconsin. I would love to be able to use our collections for outreach, research, and display. Aquatic macroinvertebrates are my favorite and I want everyone to see how stunning they are!
Malacara: I think this will be great for my future career. The kind of work we are doing with this project is exactly what I want to be doing with my life. Beyond this, it looks good for a grad school application; the experience is just so much fun that it fuels me to do well in all my academics so I can one day lead projects like this with my own undergrads!
The Freshwater Collaborative Steering Committee will meet Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025, from Noon-1:30 p.m. via Zoom.
Agenda
