you must r s v p for that event we don't typically require that for our other events that are coming up or anything but we have an eighty percent limit or that have been ridiculous just because he's proved that they can hold the lies for fire work my name is just vander ark i work for west michigan environmental action council we are a regional environmental organization we do education we do advocacy my title is director of environmental education so i spend a lot of time working with youth and public and teachers and trying to find ways to help them and support teaching environmental concepts in schools and also finding nadir we work together closely with our work in mexico watershed here and all around as we need hermes so every now and then i might be asking her to answer a question that i don't know so thanks for having me and also you may have noticed that i have invited the mcintyre a watershed projects and kelly got word back there she is your expert on specific mcintyre watershed issues and information so my role is more of can i get to know people and talk to people like kelly and the other experts in the watersheds and teach what she knows and what she's learning and take that knowledge and keep sharing it with schools and teachers and so that's my role that's our role so that's a little bit about our role here tonight i had a little fun with the quality of life title because so much of what we do in researching and educating about the is check out the quality of life in the watershed and that's what we're talking about here tonight we all live somewhere close to or near mcintyre a watershed so first off we like to ask the ok now you can answer that one though so what is the watershed and quite often the imagination say oh it's a shed in a cold water well not exactly it's a term we use about how water collects in our areas of land in our water so we know that water drains the lowest point we feed it have it in the bath of all the time in the sink that's how water several work our land is not flats it's full of bumps in the ridges brains created by glaciers we have the beautiful lake shore so we we don't have a flat area we live in you live in a watershed everybody does so raise your hand if you live in a watershed all right we're getting somewhere all right everybody lives in the water he said but which one does anybody know what waters that they live  you know yes many of you may live in the lake mecca tower the mecca tower watershed how many of you think you live in the back of how one excellent so let's start a little wider though so what you may not realize is you live in many watershed not just one it's a scale thing so this is what we call the north american watershed so out of all these where would we be living which watershed out of these are we in the atlantic ocean excellent so generally everything every rain that falls every range up that falls in that red area eventually will make its way into the atlantic ocean now we're scaling in a little bit american regional watershed so out of all of these who can tell me which watershed we're in out of these yes or we are in the great lakes watershed right i think we most of us knew that cracked so let's bring in a little more now within the great lakes watershed where in the smaller one can anyone tell me which watershed i don't know if you can tell the names it's a little bit blurry but can you tell me which watershed out of the great lakes watershed which one are we in yeah we're in lake michigan watershed yes the dark blue so the other ones of the other great even though we may all live in the next how watershed we may have local creeks so this gets a little bit confusing but you may or may not realize you live near pry pine creek like near west and up or peter's creek  so there's always a sub watershed and there's always a creek nearby that your actions can be affecting so part of the important thing about understanding a watershed so where does water go after it rains so yeah it falls into water said there we go exactly and  draining down remember i said it looks something like this this is your watershed it drains the lowest point exactly like a funnel so after it rains it depends right so what does it depend on where the rain goes in the mactel watershed something's happening here so anything interesting happening here that you're noticing yes ma'am yeah you see some flooding company what direction do you see flooding where you see where you think flooding is coming from  like the streets on the pavement anything else you see in that picture that might be contributing to all the water that's brewing up there yes it might be going down the drain there there might be a drain under there right what about the rooftops the water soaked through it is a kind of runoff of those two kind of it goes into the gutter which often goes either to the lawn or the driveway so correct so what we normally see in natural now i want to go back to this picture but hundred years ago what do you think was happening here what it looked like this after rainfall why not ok so what do you think might happen to the water that's cooling up there ye it would drain into the ground it would soak in and it we recharge what we use right the ground water that we use so that's the natural state i mean but we're not so much in the natural state anymore are we so this is just the diagram that explains you know when it when we have something that's paved or covered or rooftop and it can so again it becomes something called runoff so water from snow and rain all can become runoff if it's not a lot of soak into the ground infiltration the other side shows when the top of the ceiling when they can actually soak into the pores of the grounds recharge the groundwater so what happens is as we get more and more urban we have really cut off a lot of the opportunity for the rainwater so again and because of that we get more runoff and that runoff causes a problem my text stretched a little bit far but impervious surface what's happening on that pavement here when you see happening in your city and your streets in your neighborhoods when you get a lot of rain yes it floods it can't  fast enough freight so we go to these storm drains and i don't know if i'm going to have the play this cute little video i have there might be a magic ok not sure i can get it to play what it is is you may be able to see and maybe not but just the middle of a rainstorm see whenever i'm caught in a rainstorm i start looking at storm drains and see what's happening what kind of runoff is happening so sure enough i got caught in some construction in grand rapids one day and there i discovered just the most wonderful lead awful actually pulling of just water and i don't know if you can see all the sheets of water pouring off the building into the pavement and just flooding those storm drains like crazy where you can almost not see it's just like a giant just going going going so you look for the signs in your neighborhood you look for the signs in your school how the how the city is flowing to see if you're having issues so it puts our storm drains under pressure when we have these hard rains when we have a lot of impervious surfaces and it causes things like that flooding again we don't know there might be a storm drain under there that's clogged so what happens with the storm how many think it goes and gets cleaned in the waste water treatment plant a lot of people think that how many things that go straight in the stream ok so not a split vote but as you notice it leads right to something like this call the out fall so no it's not getting cleaned anything that goes in those drains just flows right here and does right into a stream more often than not so here's another example how does that water look not exactly where you want to be like maybe fishing you know wading barefoot so when it runs off the surface it's not clean before it's released into the environment so this is the number one hazard facing our great great lakes basin right now is all of the uncontrolled pollution going into our watershed based on th storm water runoff and what is pollution you know it's not a good thing right well it's when things and to the environment and they cause problems or adverse reactions so i mean what are some if this was our play back to our bees where or just lake michigan the state park i mean would you have issue with your lake looking like this you notice that these could be disposed of in a better way right exactly where they have the plastic in the ocean as we know the video coming up on thursday so just a quick review on the difference between the two main parts kinds of water pollution that we need to address and lay back the tower and the great lakes and that's a point source and not a point source so if you have a finger and you can point at it and identify the cause of that pollution quite specifically that it's point source you can point at it so obviously what's happening here there's some sort of a ship discharging some sort of a pollutant into the water so we can point  point source pollution it's a problem but it's usually regulated so it's not always the biggest problem so here's the more examples of point source pollution so like a wastewater treatment plant  if it's connected to the waterways and you have flood problems that can discharge like he used to do in grand rapids that they do not do anymore they did disconnected so that's not a problem there but that would be an example of point source we know it's coming from the sewage plant or factory discharge as you can see that top factory just charging it's a put forming a plume in your plate next time or the direct discharge like as in the ship you know  oil leak something like that so these are examples of point source which they're awful and we hear about them and we hear about it on the news and we feel awful about it and we want to prevent this from happening but but a lot of people are surprised to know that's not the biggest problem facing really meant how are the great lakes so here is the confusion and why we're pointing everywhere not point source and i have abbreviated but that stands for nonpoint source pollution is when the rain fall carries all those pollutants and it's catching from the ground and carries it and deposit it into those streams those lakes and as we showed remember we were showing talking about how all the water sets are connected and how when a drop of water lands here it still ends up in the waterway eventually that carries all the pollutants coming from our different land uses and because of that we have to manage water quality issues unlike your woodley back in town there's a lot of ways to do it some of it is prevention some of it you know you have to do upstream and some of it you can do downstream that's not going first pollution and you can't point to it and notice that's point of view you might be doing it sometimes all right so examples of not point source pollution that we're just going to go over the top looks like what boil the top right would be later and not only that belief litter the bottom left that's like field sediment  soil and then on the bottom yet fertilizer exactly in the bottom right i have a picture of it's actually didn't catch it but it's a construction site and all the water flowing off of that construction site so those are some examples so we're going to mention fertilizers herbicides pesticides oil and gasoline sediment salt bacteria from livestock and pet waste and litter so i want to do a little experiment with you while we're doing this now this is what i'm going to show you is our beautiful lake macca tower the claim yes that's clean now we're starting clean pollutants this first one is what you put your hands down i'll tell you when i'm ready to select people ok this one is called fertilizer so where does fertilizer come from comes from our houses comes from it's all right so volunteer one ma'am over there so what happens when you get fertilizer that runs off into lake macintyre i like you to pour a little fertilizer in there for me and then you can give it a little sister and go back to your sink as much as you need to whatever you see fit ok so if we fertilize before it rains perhaps this is the effect will see on our lake bachata or so that's one of the reasons we don't want for less room for error and we never want to use more than we need to so now we have a little fertilizer and i like you can go and go back to see thank you for your help so we started to get that greenish golf course lake you've seen those before he likes to go yes so fertilizer works so well that when it goes to our lakes and rivers it feeds that audi and there's a big blue big bloom explosion too much algae that sucks up all the oxygen as it dies and so they end up with this like a roasts kind of die off after a while so first it makes it bloom like crazy then it can sustain it and it makes it die off and you get this kind of dead  that really doesn't support clean healthy life in the things you want to fish for in the kind of lake you want to paddle and another thing is pesticide and herbicide so where might those come from more with the farmer is maybe farmers are bad guys they're just trying to make yeah maybe at home when you do some treatments so pesticides and herbicides if we use too all right so erosion now this is a big problem especially near by traveling dirt traveling soil traveling sentiment traveling sand think of it as like a vehicle that carries a bunch of stuff with it so sediment is like a taxicab for all those fertilizers and pesticides and things that you applied to the ground so not only has the sediment caused cloudier water but it also carries with it the pesticides and herbicides and fertilisers that we don't want to get into our watershed so here we go we had to stream a corrosion so now we have a little bit of mud expiration date was on that it's for science folks ok so now we will send that runoff to you so here we go usually want when you see women ok we live in michigan don't we so the reality and it's coming folks coming soon what that word snow winter we got to go so what happens and i don't know if you can see the direction i like this photo because you can see you know these are the deposits of any bridge that's going to drop right into the water and you can see the the salt as it dries and runs all right here so what happens when we get that spring melts and all that salt is getting in there and you might not be able to see it but do you think it affects the water at all yeah sure does thank you so the next one re we are parking lot at the runoff is going down the drain when you think that does for our streams yet they get the oil and gas it affects the ph level it makes the water more acidic so what happens when we have too much leaky oil too much gas running off the parking lot we're not being careful with our oil let's go ahead and have you run out so this is the oil from our cars so go ahead and pour in some oil from your tires this is what happens when they go down the storm drain because it's not getting cleaned it's getting put into your lake give it a little stir excellent ok so we've already talked a little bit about sentiment but there's the kind that comes from like collapsing landscaping riverside's and there's the kind that comes from when we're doing some construction projects which happens but you know a lot of construction people work really hard to not make this happen but it's a reality can be very hard to control so with construction erosion you can have a couple more right come on up and go ahead and put some more sediment in there because if we're not keeping our set of it where it is it's running into our lakes and rivers and i was running into our like see parents raising their hand that's not how it's supposed to go so here's i'm hoping you have parents because now we can say not only is it a little we don't want to look at it and step in it but it's  to share so it's so important that we pick up after impact so are you ready now you know what this is supposed to be but it's really really you know so so if we're not cleaning up after our pets and it's running down our drains and into our watershed they're perfect then where are we going with our lake how many are still going for during th now i don't know if you have an order of vision but it doesn't smell very good in their own or vision of make sense all right last one one of the last one comes from our friends you know yes they do many good things for us but if we don't control where our animals are grazing then we don't control the pollution that comes from these animals so we're not supposed to feed the geese so many of you realize that we aren't supposed to feed the geese thank you because not everybody does and it's a little you know it's a tradition thing but  alive and come through the droppings of geese is actually pretty harmful to waterways and it can cause people to get sick so the wisdom is not to feed the kids to let them eat naturally and don't let you because i know you are cows right so we don't let them just walk through the water so same thing though the bacteria the eco ally those types of things we don't want in our waterways does not help our water quality and one more letter and you want more of them for who hasn't  challenge you not to litter anymore because not only does it look a little bad in our environment what do you see up there on the drain the litter can go through the drain and up in our waterways we get those plastics so we added litter and we'll pretend those are plastics and this is how our lake has evolved ok i know that superfund you guys all right so what will you do to protect your watershed what what watershed are we talking about protecting here la tower ok so why do we like lake mack a tower what do you think they do with lake mega tower that makes you feel like you want to protect it or keep it clean and i'd love to hear some adults too so how  you use it how do you it's like mecca tower or the parks yes paddleboarding anybody else paddleboard yeah what other things do we do you fish yeah any specific fish that you know that people catch in the lake  absolutely a salmon lay trout ok what else do we do we fish paddle board boating what else sail boat ing anything else photography birding identifying the diversity in the area what us swimming i swim i grew up swimming in this leg you know i want to be clean and healthy so there's things we can do first we need to connect we connect with our watershed at least i know today you believe you know you live in the mcintyre waters you know your actions affect the backtalk watershed so the cool thing is you're in a place here where you're never more than six miles from fresh water that's part of being in the great lakes basin and you never more than eighty five miles from the great lakes so the classroom is out there folks use your parks the parks are the most wonderful place to do investigations with your family with your students with anybody that is willing to just take the time and immerse a little bit more about their own watershed health or just enjoying the park and appreciating so here are all examples of what we do part of our work together that andrea and i both do is we run a program called teach for the watershed and we take anywhere from two thousand to three thousand students out of experiences like this we do it as well we have a big section of lake mack a towel that we do and we do a lot of sampling in the late michael tell watershed as well as others and so that's a big part of our work is is fine you know great location the great parks connecting to the people in those the learning about the issues of those parks and then making sure that the kids that live by those parks you know their names know the stream name and actually can do their own little investigation and understand how water quality is  those parks so one of the ways we do it is we see the quality of life in the watershed so you can tell a lot by seeing what's living somewhere i mean that tells a big story so just by existing there are things that will tell you about the polity of your water so there's these critters called macro invertebrates that's a fancy word well let's let's cuisia what  vertebrates i taught you big word today ok so here's what we do and here's what so fun about investigating the quality of life in your watershed and you can do this in any stream even like a drainage ditch folks we have sampled drainage ditches on more than one occasion so each one is from a different location and you can see that there's different types of life in that location now does anybody recognise what these are great fish very again so those are so fun to find and they're everywhere around here and they tell us a little bit about water quality over here looking creepy things are yeah you're right so the other thing that is cool about investigating the quality of life in your watershed is you can talk about life cycle on the left we have a beautiful little me fly which is something you may have used as fishing bait fish for trout or any of those fish though you can you can get them just like this which i think is so cool because it's like i'm a fly if you use it as a bait that means you're looking for a specific type of fish right so if you're finding a stream that has those there's a good chance that there might be some child there eating them for one and the other thing as you can nearby come across something like that on the right and then the hashmi so you see the whole life cycle so that's the same critter in a different stage of its life cycle so may fly good indicator of good water ball ity always good to find them and you'll find fisherman using them when they want to find a better quality fish so there's another may fly on the left and your friend the crayfish on the right when we find them together is a good another good indicator of water quality it's positive so one other way that we engage with our parks and make the education valuable to working with students in our parks and in their watersheds is helping having them help us keep them clean and spend some time investing  picking up litter and dealing with some of the problems you know it's amazing how many times you see kids get out there they're like do you pick up trash and then they get into it it flew from comes competitive and then they actually really start to think about why does this stuff end up here and what kind of behavior do i see in my friends and myself that is making these things and up here in a park where people are trying to enjoy the land together so  it's just so valuable and to walk away from your experience with the park leaving it cleaner and leaving it better it's a satisfaction you can share with yourself your family your students and do it as often as you can now the other great things about engaging with the community is gives you the chance to be a scientist engaging with your parks in your water so you know there's lots of different ways you can run very simple task little kids little ways that you know it's thirty dollars kids to do a simple water quality test if you want to do something like that with your your students or your groups but it's a fun way to keep aware of how the water quality is in your area so using your own facilities now education is available right outside the door whether they are home whether it's at your school or your place of business walk around your campus see what's going on take an umbrella go in the rain storm see where water is puddling see what you think pollution problems might be happening i use this example because there's good things and bad things happen here what would be a positive thing but you see that black thing lining there that you think that is doing what that yes filtering sentiment for getting caught in that dream that's a great so that's part of it but what's the negative about that set up for a storm during that we might be able to talk about again well the water will get through and pretty fast because it's just pavement in the lawn it's going to run in there to quickly so not a whole lot like slowing down the water in the whole thing is when water follows you want to keep it where it lands so this is a catch basin you may not have known you know the storm drain and i know it's also called the catch basin you catch all the crud that's going to go in the water and pollute your water way before it gets in there so i just snapped a picture of that one a couple of days getting on my car a couple days ago got all that set me got cigarette butts all that stuff just clean storm drains i mean that's a great activity to do if you want to just spend some time working towards helping the water polity in your area i know students and teachers and groups that adopt catch basins so they decide they commit to keeping one of them clean or it could be the one on your neighborhood you notice that you keep an eye on it when it gets jammed up just take a loved grab it throw it in the trash and you've helped a lot that's one of our rock star youth there so getting into actions that you can do to help protect like i can tell of in the water quality because we want the water  drop want to stay we don't want to become runoff so we're also going to take a few minutes after this presentation is done and kind of showcase a few of the ideas we've talked about here so make sure you stick around for that and then we're going to give away  so stick around for a long enough to do that as well rain barrels pretty obvious they catch the rain that it's directed from your roof and usually through some sort of a gutter set up place on your house we help with that if you have any questions about it too as well so this whole point is you know get involved talk about it you can paint i mean we use those latex furniture paintings and  fishing yeah it's a winner the other thing is planting and maintaining range gardens yeah basically rain garden is just of a system of of native plants designed to hold water and help it soak in the thing with plants is they are natural filters they keep some of that pollutants that would be getting into the water they keep it from getting that they can gently out take it they catch litter so you see rain gardens often around storm drains and so they serve that her best and also just use and much to see even behind those kids on the right that whole big patch is a rain garden right in the center of the storm drain and the kids maintain that so there's green infrastructure and these are actually pictures of hope college they've done a lot of work updating some of their pavement into porous pavement some of these special stones that will actually soak water through so a lot of exciting great stuff happening like it hoping other places nearby that you can actually tour and see and this is all going to help stop pollutants from carrying right into the mactel watershed so this is an awesome way when you can do it learning about an invasive species another way you'll see that the gentleman in the top left top right is holding a big garlic mustard plant just to recap the different things you can do rain barrels porous pavement and native plants we always encourage native plants they have a long history it's they're built to tolerate michigan winners  vegetated buffers domo all the way to the end of your water way leave all of vegetated strip and that will help keep that water a little bit cleaner so if you have a pond if you if you don't know all the way around it you're doing a disservice the more you of that grass fall into the pond then you're creating a problem with dk matterhorn oxygen so we always recommend you have a buffer strip so that concludes my presentation part of this this evening that's my contact information teach for the watershed is the program from which many of these pictures came from i would like to kind of introduce you to the different things going questions is that will all engage with the station so i actually went and i scooped up a couple a mat rose from stem visitor trails before i came here so you're already sorted some of them and over there you'll see a white  just like hercules yeah so we shall show you how those work we can walk from here to there so you can flow through the stations and also kelly has so many good resources over here with the mag watershed project books information homeowner tips all the good stuff so there's just a great things and also we have stuff in the back like some non point source pollution bag stickers things like that dealing with me  so before we break into those i do want to ask if anybody has questions about the presentation or anything that we talked about then that you would like to hear a little more yeah get good but well we have a rain barrel program and ours we have a certain like educational program so we do it with some rain barrel workshops you can also get rain barrels you can order them online prices vary a workshop like ours thirty it would cost thirty fifty dollars then you buy it on line eight ends up being closer to one hundred a lot of times when you get the nicer contraptions and we have some ones yes