When Michael Holly, an assistant professor at UW-Green Bay, began evaluating the use of natural and industrial by-products for their phosphorus sorption potential, he had no idea where the project would lead.
A $10,000 grant from the Freshwater Collaborative in 2020 to hire an undergraduate researcher for his lab helped kick things off. Since receiving the initial funding, Holly has hired multiple students, and he’s incorporated the research into UW-Green Bay’s environmental science capstone courses to provide students with research experience and practice analyzing data.
The payoff goes beyond student training. Testing filter media for Calumet, Outagamie and Brown Counties has become a core function of Holly’s lab — and preliminary data from the Freshwater Collaborative grant played a key role in securing more funding.
“The whole process really started when I got funds for a student to try things,” Holly says. “The funding helped me develop and home in on my methods and the materials I was using so I could be more competitive in applying for larger funding sources.”
In 2023, Holly and his colleagues Karen Stahlheber, Mandeep Bakshi, and Jessica Warwick received a $750,000 Capacity Building Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA). The research includes collaborators from Outagamie County, USGS, and UW-Platteville.
Their goal is to develop cost-effective solutions for removing phosphorus from agricultural runoff and reducing harmful algal blooms in the Great Lakes. The USDA grant will provide support for three graduate research assistantships, multiple undergraduate research assistants, and remote water quality monitoring equipment.
The investment will improve the agricultural runoff treatment system researchers use for testing filters, which is located on property owned by Heart of the Valley Metropolitan Sewerage District. Eventually they hope to work with farmers to deploy efficient and economical systems that will reduce agricultural nutrients running into water sources.
Just as exciting is that the researchers are converting various waste products into filter media to help create a circular economy. For example, they are testing steel waste from Charter Steel.
“We hope we can help local industries be more sustainable,” Holly says.
For UW-Stout senior El Bartho, interning at the UW-River Falls Ecological Restoration Institute (ERI) was the perfect way to determine what she wants to do after graduation.
The Environmental Science major, who is double minoring in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and studio art, interned as a conservation technician in summer 2023, working on a pilot project with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) St. Croix Wetland Management District.
“I really wanted to learn the restoration and preservation tactics implemented by real-life organizations, and this internship allowed me to see the techniques used on a local level and on a federal level,” Bartho says.
The ERI is a donor-funded initiative established in 2020 to provide high impact experiences for UW-River Falls students going into conservation and environmental science. The ERI offers work experience and internships to undergraduates as well as certifications in chainsaw safety, aquatic and mosquito pesticide application, ATV and boat safety trainings with the WDNR, NOLS-accredited wilderness first response training, and wildfire fighter training. In 2023, 78 UW-River Falls students enrolled in one of the training/certification courses.
“The idea is to give students boots-on-the-ground experiences that translate to career skills that allow them to be productive contributors right out of the gate, which is really exciting,” says Holly Dolliver, professor of geology and soil science at UW-River Falls.
Dolliver hopes that in the future, with additional funding, the ERI would be able to offer certifications to students from other UW campuses and the broader community.
“We are exploring the possibility to extend our certifications and trainings to the community,” she says. “We’re in a very conservation-centric area of Wisconsin. There’s a lot of interest and a lot of need. We are well-positioned to be a center of excellence in conservation education and training.”
Dolliver says the Freshwater Collaborative grant also allowed UW-River Falls to expand the joint internships with USFWS. Bartho was the first intern hired from another campus, and she found it beneficial to share ideas and perspectives she gained at UW-Stout from faculty and students from UW-River Falls.
“I found it incredibly interesting to see how UW-River Falls incorporates their on-campus resources into their curriculum,” she says. “I was able to combine the knowledge I gained from my time at UW-Stout with my newly acquired knowledge from UW-River Falls and USFWS.”
She and her coworkers spent four days a week working at USFWS Waterfowl Production Area (WPA) sites — small federally protected areas of land that provide recreational activities and habitat — and one day a week on the UW-River Falls campus where they implemented what they learned on campus restoration projects that include forest systems and a floodplain managed as a wet prairie of the South Fork River System.
The interns also received Wisconsin Water Action Volunteer training to be able to determine the water health of Wisconsin streams and became herbicide applicator licensed in the state of Wisconsin. One of the things Bartho enjoyed most was the range of locations and experiences, including duck banding with the Wisconsin DNR, picking and planting seeds, water sampling with hydrologists, vegetation surveys, bird surveys, aquatic invasives monitoring, and nature and bird walks.
She also appreciated how her supervisors took time to partner her with federal and state hydrologists and encouraged her to explore her interest in GIS. Those experiences helped her determine she would like to pursue a career in bathymetry, the study of the underwater beds of water bodies that will allow her to combine multiple interests.
“I wanted an internship that allowed me to explore the possibilities that a career in my major could entail and that’s what I got!” she says. “I’d like to extend my gratitude to the UWRF Ecological Restoration Institute, the Freshwater Collaborative, and the USFWS St. Croix Wetland Management District for all their planning and organization that went into this program that allowed me to have this internship.”
Visit www.uwrf.edu/PES/ERI.cfm to learn more about the certifications and trainings offered by the Ecological Restoration Institute.
On a bitterly cold morning in January, teachers and educators from around northeast Wisconsin gathered at Barkhausen Waterfowl Preserve to learn how to play and teach the Sea Grant Watershed Game.
The interactive board game helps students and local leaders understand the connection between land use and water quality. Through a series of active, hands-on simulations, participants learn how land-use decisions impact water quality and natural resources. The game is used in more than 15 states across the country.
The workshop, which was organized by UW-Green Bay, focused on the Stream Model version of the game. Kathy Biernat, owner of Zanilu Educational Services, and Anne Moser, senior special librarian and education coordinator at Wisconsin Sea Grant, introduced the watershed concept through a fun version of “three truths and a lie” about watersheds. They then walked through lesson plans and stewardship concepts to accompany the Watershed Game.
To play, the educators divided into groups, with each group representing a community they that needs to reduce excess phosphorus runoff. They debated land-use decisions, the costs and benefits of implementing land-use changes, and the trade-offs of various flood resiliency actions for their community.
After a spirited game, Biernat and Moser led educators through a discussion of how they might implement the Stream Model into their classrooms and educational venues. They also discussed other classrooms activities that would support lessons around nonpoint source pollution and community decision-making for water quality. Each educator took home a Stream Game and lesson plans for implementing the activity in their school.
Logan Lassee, an assistant naturalist at Brown County Parks Department, plans to incorporate the game into a recycling program for fifth and sixth graders.
“The workshop was an exciting event where there was collaboration amongst educators from many different areas of education,” he says. “I personally thought this game was a very fun and a realistic approach to understanding how land and water use can affect the ecosystem on a larger scale.”
Andrea Stromeyer, the education programs coordinator at the Door County Maritime Museum, is familiar with watersheds but new to bringing STEM programming to a history museum. She appreciates the framework the game provides.
“This game touches on points about land management surrounding watersheds that I didn’t previously think to add into my classroom discussions,” she says. “I especially love how I can scaffold this up or down depending on the ages of students and sizes of classes.”
Stromeyer plans to incorporate the game into Great Lakes Literacy-based programs this summer. She and her colleagues have also been thinking about interesting expansion ideas relevant to their specific Door County area.
“I’m thankful to the Freshwater Collaborative and the other hosts of this workshop for supporting Wisconsin educators by providing us copies of the game,” she adds.
This workshop was primarily sponsored by the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin with support from Wisconsin Sea Grant. Emily Tyner and Lynn Terrien at UW-Green Bay planned and organized the workshop as part of a Freshwater Collaborative–supported grant. Learn more about UW-Green Bay’s Educators and Students Rise to Freshwater Challenges programs at www.uwgb.edu/freshwater-collaborative.
Water research can result in a lot of plastic waste. High-quality sample collection — such as that for researching emerging contaminants like perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — requires sterilized containers that, unfortunately, can’t be reused or even recycled in most cases.
Is there an economical and efficient way to reduce the waste?
Product engineers at Whirl-Pak, Filtration Group, a Wisconsin-based company that makes secure sampling bags, think there is, and they’ve tapped students and faculty at UW Oshkosh to help.
Whirl-Pak is well-known in the dairy industry, having developed a process called the universal sampling procedure to help ensure milk quality. The company branched into the water industry in 1981 and has seen significant success in the United Kingdom with replacing conventional rigid sampling bottles with their flexible bags, which require less plastic, water and emissions to produce and ship. To grow their business in the United States, they wanted to identify a lab that was processing large quantities of water samples.
When a company representative asked the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin for help, Marissa Jablonski, executive director, immediately thought of UW Oshkosh’s Environmental Research and Innovation Center (ERIC). The state-certified laboratory hires students to provide well water testing and bacteriological and chemical analysis for water systems.
The connection has resulted in a university-industry partnership that provides valuable work experience for students, helps solve a business challenge and may reduce plastic pollution. It’s a win-win-win project that exemplifies how academia and industry can work together.
Their efforts are being supported by the Water Enterprise Program at UW Oshkosh, which connects university researchers and students with industry partners to address issues important to those partners. The program is part of the suite of projects at UW Oshkosh funded by the Freshwater Collaborative. It allows faculty and academic staff to request a mini grant (up to $15,000) to work on an innovative project with an external partner. The projects must also include student researchers.
Carmen Ebert, associate lab director for ERIC lab, submitted a request in 2022 to conduct initial research and development on Whirl-Pak products.
“This was an opportunity to jumpstart the project with Whirl-Pak,” she says. “We looked at the feasibility of using their bags for collection as well as incubation of samples in the lab. We then inoculated the bags with known organisms and compared the bags to known methods of collection.”
Once they proved Whirl-Pak bags could be used to sample effectively and that samplers liked using them, Cherelle Bishop, Whirl-Pak’s product engineering manager, wanted to develop a more targeted case study. Bishop wants to gather data to show potential customers that their sampling bags work just as well as conventional containers — and have the added benefits of reducing plastic waste and the storage space required for collection containers.
She and Ebert received a second mini grant from the Water Enterprise Program in 2023 to conduct more in-depth testing of the bags and their ability to sample surface and well water. Students conduct the lab testing and analysis under the guidance of ERIC staff. Erick Carranza, a UW Oshkosh graduate student, says working on the project has increased his familiarity with methods of detecting bacteria.
“My favorite part of this project has been being exposed to a new form of detection for coliform bacteria and E. coli,” he says. “I had never used the standard method of detection prior to working at the ERIC lab, and now learning the Whirl-Pak method for the same purpose is exciting.”
The partnership goes beyond R&D. Last year, Bishop was invited to the Great Lakes Beach Association Conference, which was hosted by UW Oshkosh, and the Freshwater Collaborative’s FresH2O Partner event. Both events provided her with opportunities to meet more people working in the water sector and learn what’s important to them. She also visited UW Oshkosh to meet students and see firsthand some of the other research taking place. She sees the partnership as mutually beneficial.
“UW Oshkosh is a Wisconsin-based university and we’re a Wisconsin-based company. We want stronger ties with the UW System,” she says. “We wanted to craft something that was exciting for both of us. There’s engagement and momentum and that can only bring good things to both sides.”
A career in water or the environment never occurred to AJ Jeninga until she took a winter break course to Yellowstone as an undergraduate. Now a double alumna of the Universities of Wisconsin, Jeninga was hired as the first-ever emerging contaminant outreach specialist at the University of Wisconsin – Extension’s Natural Resources Institute. She works with the community and local health departments to build a better response to PFAS contamination.
“Most of my projects are water-related because that’s my background,” she says, “and most of my focus is on creating partnerships and providing support for people working on emerging contaminants.”
The new position was created in response to the growing number of questions and concerns about PFAS that Extension was receiving from community members throughout the state. Jeninga’s combination of research and outreach experience helped her stand out in the hiring process.
“AJ was an excellent candidate with a great blend of applicable research skills and experience working with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services,” says Chad Cook, Jeninga’s supervisor and Extension’s associate director of outreach. “Her research provided a strong foundation in understanding not only PFAS but other emerging contaminants and gave her the skills and confidence to interpret and share technical research with non-technical audiences.”
Jeninga credits her faculty mentors at UW-Whitewater and UW-La Crosse for inspiring her passion for water advocacy and providing opportunities that prepared her for her current position.
“I worked with a lot of different people through my research projects. I developed my people skills and figured out people’s work styles,” she says. “And the most important skill I acquired as a student was the ability to break down research and make it accessible for people who aren’t toxicologists or researchers.”
The Delavan native originally enrolled at UW-Whitewater as a pre-med biology major, but after Yellowstone, she switched to an environmental track. She took ecology and environmental toxicology with Professor Elisabeth Harrahy, and then joined Harrahy’s lab as an undergraduate researcher on one of the first projects funded by the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin.
Harrahy was collaborating with Professor Tisha King-Heiden at UW-La Crosse to look at the effects of two common pesticides on aquatic species. Harrahy’s lab was studying the effects of thiamethoxam and imidacloprid on invertebrates, while King-Heiden was studying their effects on fish.
“I got to do field work, which I had not had the opportunity to do up until that point, and I learned a lot about lab practices,” Jeninga says.
Jeninga’s research experience was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but after graduation in May 2020, she enrolled in graduate school at UW-La Crosse to work on King-Heiden’s fish research. She had the opportunity to give back by mentoring new undergraduates who were being funded by the Freshwater Collaborative.
During that time, she presented her research at the Mississippi River Research Consortium and the Midwest Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) Conference, where she won an award for best student poster, and the North American SETAC Conference. Jeninga’s thesis work on the adverse effects of imidacloprid on fathead minnows was published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistryin 2023.
Her time in graduate school also connected her to staff at the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene, with whom she worked closely. Those connections helped her land a one-year Water Resources Policy Fellowship with Wisconsin Sea Grant, during which time she switched her focus to PFAS in groundwater. The fellowship prepared her to take on her challenging new role.
“AJ’s combination of research and translation/outreach fit perfectly into what we were looking for,” Cook says. “Our position is a new one that we are defining as we go so AJ’s ability to work in somewhat nebulous conditions without clear outcomes is an asset as, together, we can figure out how this position can best support PFAS efforts across the state.”
As a Wisconsinite, Jeninga is proud to live in a state that is taking a lead role on PFAS research. The more she learns about emerging contaminants, the more passionate she feels about her work.
She’s already created a step-by-step guide that helps citizens interpret their private well water reports and provides resources so they know how to advocate for themselves if their wells are contaminated. Another project is a story map that will look at PFAS research in Wisconsin and focuses on people who’ve been affected. A long-term goal is to help create a standardized response to PFAS contamination.
“I like talking to homeowners and others about PFAS. It’s incredibly intimidating and complicated, and we need community partnerships to make change,” she says. “I think it’s really cool that Wisconsin has dedicated so many resources to PFAS.”
When it comes to addressing water challenges, the focus is often on scientific research. Advancing science is critical to protecting our state’s water systems — and so is raising awareness of issues and encouraging community members to get involved.
UW-Parkside sought to do just that with a grant from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin that funded the summer 2023 issue of its ROOT Magazine, which focused on water challenges.
ROOT magazine is a community-based learning project that is part of UW-Parkside’s “Writing for Multimedia” course. Each edition pairs students with a community partner — in this case, the Freshwater Collaborative — to accomplish a shared communication goal. The resulting magazine is distributed at the Racine Visitors Bureau, the Rita Tallent Picken Regional Center for the Arts and Humanities and local businesses.
The water edition brought together students and faculty from Communications, Biology, and Art and Design as well as local photographer Glen Larson. The course was taught by veteran journalist Denise Lockwood, who owns the Racine County Eye and has written extensively about water issues.
Students wrote about challenges effecting southeast Wisconsin, such as coastal erosion, safe drinking water, clean beaches, and the impact of road salt. The magazine also informed readers about the Freshwater Collaborative and UW-Parkside’s involvement.
Not only did students conduct research and interviews, but they also held a 90-minute panel discussion on campus that included faculty and staff from UW-Parkside’s Biology and Sustainable Management departments and local community members from the Root-Pike Watershed Initiative Network.
“The panel discussion allowed students to really get an understanding of how to ask interview questions on the spot, which was a nice challenge for them,” says Adrienne Viramontes, professor and chair of the Communication Department. “Another real benefit is they had the opportunity to network and get to know people they wouldn’t normally meet, and you never know when that’s going to benefit you as a professional.”
In a personal reflection for ROOT, student Nick Brown shared how the project raised his awareness of how many people in the United States are affected by poor water quality.
He wrote: “This community-based learning project brought the importance of water quality to my front page. Thankfully, I have never had to deal with low-quality water. But after hearing from experts and community members with firsthand experience, it has shown me the magnitude of the problem.”
Not many undergraduate students can say they’ve helped to design a university level course. Max Stafford at UW-Green Bay, Antoni Haupt at UW-Milwaukee and Jonathan Cochrane at UW-Parkside had the unique experience of participating in the pilot course “Human Interactions with Lake Michigan Coastal Ecosystems.”
They provided feedback and insight to John Janssen and Liz Sutton at UW-Milwaukee, Chris Houghton at UW-Green Bay and Julie Kinzelman at UW-Parkside, who developed the course using funding from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin.
“Great Lakes ecosystems are unique among freshwater systems due to their large size and depth,” Janssen says. “They support diverse industries and often large populations, and they see adverse impacts due to wastewater, including sewage and runoff from urban and agricultural areas.”
The highly immersive course will be offered May 28–June 24, 2024, to sophomores and juniors enrolled at any UW System school through an application process. To keep the course affordable, lodging and food costs will be covered by a second Freshwater Collaborative grant.
Haupt, who is originally from Minnetonka, Minn., and is enrolled in the accelerated master’s degree program at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, says one of the benefits of the course was getting to see new areas of Wisconsin and working with professors from other universities.
“I ideally want to go into habitat remediation, and this course definitely helped me prepare for this,” she says.
Students accepted into the summer 2024 course will explore habitats along the coast of Lake Michigan from Green Bay, Peshtigo, Manitowoc and Sheboygan to the more urban areas of Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha. They will learn basic sampling techniques and technologies to study the human impacts on the coastal ecosystem. Weeks one and four of the course will take place online with pre-reading, discussions, and a final project.
The second and third weeks involve travel along the Lake Michigan coast and nearshore to see firsthand the impacts of human activities, including commercial fishing, industrial pollution, dredging, urbanization as well as harbor management and coastal restoration. Students will explore areas such as the eutrophic Duck Creek Delta, Peshtigo wetlands, the Fox River plume, the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, small coastal streams near Kingfisher Farm, the Milwaukee Estuary Area of Concern, and the Kenosha Dunes.
In addition to being taught by faculty from three universities, students will learn from water professionals from NEW Water, NOAA, and Riveredge Nature Center’s sturgeon rearing facility. They will also create a project that educates the community about human-environmental interactions involving Lake Michigan — a key part of the course that will help raise awareness of some of Wisconsin’s water challenges.
Originally from Milon, Mich., Stafford has spent many summers boating and was aware of some of the issues affecting Lake Michigan, but he says seeing the effects of erosion and the success or failure of restoration projects was eye-opening.
“I would highly recommend this course,” he says. “It will help you understand not just yourself and your major, but also what’s going on around you. It was a unique perspective and look at Lake Michigan. And it opens your eyes to possibilities for future careers and gives you tools and experience for down the line.”
COURSE INFORMATION
Course: Human Interactions with Lake Michigan Coastal Ecosystems Dates: May 28–June 22, 2024 Student Eligibility: Open to sophomores and juniors enrolled at any Universities of Wisconsin school. Admissions Process:
Students interested in this course must apply by March 31 and will be notified of their permission to enroll by April 15. Spaces are limited. This course is open to all University of Wisconsin students. Students not enrolled at UW-Milwaukee must enroll as a guest student upon acceptance to the course. Lodging and meals will be provided through a grant from the Freshwater Collaborative.
Microplastics in aquatic environments pose a major threat to humans and animals, but until fairly recently, they were overlooked in terms of research and plastic pollution monitoring programs.
In 2018 when Courtney Baker, then an undergraduate student at UW-La Crosse, approached Professor Eric Strauss about researching microplastics, they thought it would be easy.
“We thought we’d get a net and find plastics in the water. It was much more complicated,” he says.
At the time, there were few research protocols for this emerging contaminant, and most sampling was being done in the ocean. To their knowledge, no one was studying samples taken from the Mississippi River, which had different vegetation and a lot more mud. Baker recalls using a basic net with a filter cup with mesh sides to do timed drags through the water. She had to identify and count the tiny plastics by hand.
Fast forward five years, and the techniques have advanced significantly. Strauss connected with Professor Bob Stelzer at UW Oshkosh and in 2020, Strauss, Stelzer, and Professor Greg Kleinheinz at UW Oshkosh received a grant from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin to involve more undergraduate students in their research. (Baker had moved onto graduate school by that point.)
“The idea was that I am on the west side of state by the Mississippi, and he’s on the east side by Lake Winnebago. They are very different systems,” Strauss says. “We wanted to compare the organisms they had in common and the level of plastics in those organisms.”
Their goal was to identify critical baseline information about the extent of microplastic contamination in the two bodies of water, which are significant sources of drinking water. The grant also allowed them to strengthen partnerships with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which was engaged in monitoring the water quality of the Upper Mississippi River but wasn’t monitoring microplastics.
The research got a big boost when UW Oshkosh received additional Freshwater Collaborative funding to purchase a Fourier Transformed Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer for its Environmental Research and Innovation Center lab.
Now undergraduate students are using FTIR technology to detect and identify microplastic particles in Wisconsin lakes and rivers. Some are looking at the presence of microplastics in fish, which may experience adverse health effects and impacts on reproduction and growth. Others are looking at microplastics in mussels, which may disrupt food webs and influence environmental health.
“This instrument is expensive. Students don’t get exposure to this type of instrument in the classroom,” says Strauss, who has taken UW-La Crosse students to UW Oshkosh to train on the spectrometer. “A lot of students have benefit from this project. It’s why these research experiences are so valuable.”
Jackie Behrens, who will graduate from UW Oshkosh in December, began volunteering on the project in 2021. Thanks to Freshwater Collaborative funding, she became a paid assistant researcher. Behrens notes that she and her team had to develop many of the methods they use to study microplastics in mussels because little research had been done previously. She also conducted her own research project on microplastics in stormwater.
“I’ve learned to always be adaptive and the importance of quality control,” she says. “My favorite part of this research was gaining a greater awareness about microplastics in our environment. I really started to pay attention to how much plastic was in my life and to find ways I can prevent microplastic pollution.”
Stelzer says the students taking part in the project are getting invaluable experience that will further their development as scientists and student researchers. Their experience also will bolster their prospects for getting hired in their fields of study.
One of the UW-La Crosse students who participated in the project was hired by the WDNR. Behrens was recently hired as a full-time research scientist at the UW Oshkosh ERIC lab. Her position is paid for through grant funds, and she will start the week after graduation.
Determining the sources of the microplastics and macro plastic debris will also help inform future outreach, mitigation and education activities in Wisconsin.
“We hope that with the Freshwater Collaborative money and this project, we can distribute information with numbers to back it up,” Strauss says. “These are systems that are local, and that’s important because the citizens of Wisconsin are going to care about what we’re finding in local bodies of waters.”
This story was co-written by Shane Nyman, UW Oshkosh, and Heidi Jeter, Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin.
The 2023 Lakeshore Water Summit at the UW-Green Bay, Manitowoc Campus provided high school students involved in UW-Green Bay’s Freshwater Scholars Summer Research Program with the opportunity to present the results of their work in water-based projects. They also learned about the results of summer water quality monitoring in streams around the county, which UW-Green Bay undergraduates perform in collaboration with community members and citizen groups in Manitowoc County.
The annual event included high school student scholars who completed internships with support from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin. They presented their work in a poster session and shared their experiences with community members, educators, and water science professionals from the Lakeshore region.
The high school students also learned about one of the opportunities for undergraduate research at UW-Green Bay. The Manitowoc campus “Stream Team,” a group of eight undergraduate students and one high school Freshwater Scholar, presented on their work in the lab of UW-Green Bay professors Becky Abler and Rick Hein to monitor and analyze water quality in four Manitowoc County streams throughout the summer. The summit, hosted in partnership with the Lakeshore Natural Resource Partnership, highlighted this work in a one-hour oral presentation following the poster session.
Two of the Freshwater Scholars featured during the summit were Codey Lai and Gail Wery. Lai, a senior at Two Rivers High School, worked with Hein and Abler on watershed monitoring. Wery, a senior at Green Bay Southwest High School, worked on fisheries research with Titus Seilheimer from Wisconsin Sea Grant.
“My favorite thing about the research this summer was the opportunity to make connections with my fellow environmental science and biology majors,” Lai says. “Presenting our research to the community was a wonderful experience, as I felt that I was contributing to community change for better environmental practices.”
The Freshwater Scholars program is part of UW-Green Bay’s ongoing work, supported in part by the Freshwater Collaborative, to recruit and train students to become water professionals.
As a child in Chaska, Minn., Madeline Behrens loved rocks and minerals, animals and being outside, but her passion for the environment went dormant in high school when her focus changed to computer sciences courses.
She enrolled at Minnesota State University, Mankato, as a computer science major but quickly realized a career behind a desk wasn’t for her.
“It didn’t spark any joy in me,” says Behrens, who began looking at other options. “Environmental science and earth studies popped out at me. Reading through the classes sparked my passion for the environment again.”
She switched her major second semester. The following fall, a biology professor shared a flyer about summer internship opportunities through UW Oshkosh, which were supported by a Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin grant. Behrens was intrigued and reached out to Greg Kleinheinz, professor and director of UW Oshkosh’s Environmental Research & Innovation Center (ERIC), to learn more.
“It sounded really cool. It would get me fieldwork and lab experience,” she says.
Behrens chose to intern with the marine debris and water quality monitoring group in Door County. She spent the summer with a team of six students, collecting water samples at about 40 beaches. They recorded E. coli levels and worked with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to put out advisories and beach closures when necessary. She also conducted well water testing for the public.
Behrens also spent time on the marine debris mitigation boat. The students removed about 6,300 pounds of trash, ranging from small plastic pieces and shotgun wadding to large items such as stoves, dishwashers, trashcan lids, and giant tractor tires.
The debris the students removed from Door County is just a fraction of the trash that makes its way into the water every season. Certain areas in Green Bay trapped large amounts of garbage daily. Behrens says it was sometimes disheartening to spend hours cleaning an area only to find more trash the next day, but overall, she felt good about her job.
“Someone needs to clean up debris to give people an idea of how much trash is in the water. Seeing the pictures and hearing the numbers of trash pulled from an area around you establishes more of a personal reason for caring about the environment,” she says. “One of the most important steps in the process of marine debris cleanup is bringing awareness to people. If people know the environmental effects of marine debris, maybe next time they will think twice before dumping trash off the side of their boat.”
The summer research experience in Door County reinforced Behrens’ desire to work in environmental science. After learning that the retirement of two Mankato faculty might delay her ability to take key classes she would need to graduate, she transferred to UW Oshkosh.
“I liked the campus and the town,” she says. “The class list offered a lot of variety in the areas I’m interested in.”
Behrens is now in her first semester at UW Oshkosh and is pleased with her decision. In October, she presented her marine debris research at the Great Lakes Beach Association Conference. Next semester she hopes to work in the ERIC lab to gain additional hands-on experience — and she should graduate on time and ready for a career in water.
“I’m in a good spot and should finish in four years,” she says. “I’m not sure of my job path, so I’m taking a variety of environmental science classes. I’m leaning toward water quality but am also interested in toxicology.”
Freshwater Collaborative funding helps to support UW Oshkosh’s efforts to hire multiple students each summer to conduct water-quality field research in Door and Manitowoc Counties, collect plastics and conduct microplastic research, and conduct well water testing at various locations, including the ERIC lab. Interested students should contact Greg Kleinheinz at kleinhei@uwosh.edu. Students from any university are welcome to apply.