the last two years we've been working on a watershed project and it has been funded largely through private donors those involved personnel from the mac and from travis really was in the company from the outdoor discovery center and  somewhere of the order of fifteen eighteen students of mine working on a research project for about eighteen months and we were tossed by some private donors to and so what can we do about like mike and what we proposed was to study it and then report back some findings and then the hard part will be what do you then do based on these findings at the end of eighteen months we have some findings and that's what i'm going to present to you today the watershed as you know has some issues with it those are very important for those that surround it the water quality is poor and has remained so for many years and there are few areas that we're most concerned with and the there's a report sitting in front of you by the way i'm sorry this is the printed report that i'm not going to follow it all but that will have all the information i digest digested into a one page summary on the front and then several pages of of pictures and data behind it this is what was given back to the donors about a month and a half ago and so those are the results of our study of various pictures you can take back with you and that you are free to disseminate with we would like to share the more people we can tell about the community about more people in the community we can tell about this the more likely we are to be able to find solutions for like max and there are two separate issues they're related somewhat but not entirely as you know and this is the pictures you'll see lots of them in there and there's a large plume of sediment that enters lake michigan from like microsoft like mac flooding as you roll very keenly aware and water isn't supposed to be chocolate brown as it comes down the river but this in this area we're used to and this is what we see every time it rains we went out with the sediment collection devices the forty six of these placed around th area this was of a design we got out of winter and this is a horizontal two that actually collected sediment when it flooded so when the when the rains come we collect sediment in here there's an inlet tube an outlet tube will flow slows down inside there's a certain percentage of sediment that's trapped inside that to we had these things located all around the watershed this is this summer unfortunately didn't rain much this summer as you may have been aware but last year we did this for a full year in two thousand and eleven and we got lots of good events there this is two thousand and eleven sampling events and this is just the gauging station out of adam's tree landing where there's a u s g s caging station that shows the water level and this is typically what happens in this area we get a dry season in the summer and then in the winter and  n the spring we get a lot of rain and we had something like eight really good events last spring starting from a snow melt here all the way up to release serious types of rains that happened this wasn't our hundred year flood or anything like that but this is a typical here with lots of good events eight of them in two thousand and eleven that we were able to collect in each of those events these streams rose the the tubes that i showed you are actually buried under if these sites and they're under water and when the water three recruits the students go out and harvest the that's pretty easy to do you put them in like this there's no danger of washing students away because you go down when the water is low you harvest the tube and collect how much sun comes out a very simple idea but you can actually count how much mud is going down each stream and the importance of that comes up when you can then graphically look at the results where did your smog where your settlement come from at the moment we know it's non point source but that's all we know it's not attributed to the zeal and board of public works it's not attributed for anybody any one point source th coming off everybody's land and the question is where is it coming off more and if you look at the total amount of mud coming off it's astronomical these tubes typically in wisconsin will collect one to three grams we're getting in this to win this event hundred eighty grams so sixty times the level we can get in a stream in wisconsin that's our point of reference but in terms of absolute quantities you can then divide the quantities by the per unit area that it comes from and instantly you will see that there's a ring that most of the sediments coming from it's not really coming from the mayor's house it's coming from out in the in the area around curt's happy that it's one of those things that the settlement is transporting off the fields that we have surrounding the bulk of this area is still agricultural and most of the se distribution didn't look anything like what we actually collected when we put our data on top of what we actually collected the difference is quite noticeable this is what we believe the sediments coming from this is what the model said and so as a result of that this is the orange the areas identified as being more likely by a local engineering survey and then sure enough we found some very large circles coming from these outta lying areas which are actually under agricultural production right now as a result of our data we can come up with a rank order of where we think the most adamant is a originating from and it's not down to the farm by farm but it's down to the some watershed by subordinate everything within this circle drains out through big red  but we can divide it into six or seven major sub order sheds and even within the sub watershed we have some ability to distinguish where the sediment load is coming from that sediment load washes down hang around of it and the reason is because of nothing that we're actually doing right now because historically this whole area was forested and it was always it was always flat sand dunes on this side everything out here was pretty flat but the first thing the dutch did when they settled this area was very industrious cut down all the trees and we did we cut down old growth forests are gone from this of the watershed there are no forests like there were there are wonderful historical records that said it took a day by horseback to travel between zealand and holland because you had to go around the sea just one had to go down to singapore and back to get around it and that's because it was so thick with swamp and with trees that you couldn't travel couldn't make passage through there and there are wonderful passages in historical archives records of a man with an axe couldn't cut down a cedar tree because every time he swung the axe back he hit the second one is a two hundred foot see the tree so close together you couldn't swing an axe between them you had to cut him down with a sore but luckily our forefathers here knew how to cut things out of the sore and they did and they cleared every stump to make arable land when you do that and you change the native hydrology of the surface and guess what dreams don't really go like this naturally they don't really follow the roads and so everything that they did afterwards they came from the netherlands they know how to deal with high water levels what do you do you cut a drain and you drain them and what remains off to drain the water out is arable land and it was critical for the early settlement to do that so everything that was done to this watershed was done in the late eight hundred fifty s early one thousand eight hundred seventy s and from that point on the water quality in lake mack went down health ok everything the farmers do now isn't really doing anything actively except that they're actually using the land and so what happens in here we get a half inch of rain nothing happens and ensure a nothing happens and then suddenly all the water saturated all the soil saturated they pick up and they transport and the where they're coming from is modeled here we're actually now measured here and we can actually identify areas where if you want to return to improve the water quality and like macro do so that nutrient loading that's coming in with the soil you've got to stop the soil and soil is a lot easier to measure than phosphate though we have made phosphate measurements as well one of the things that we have done oh interesting thing happened and this is a something that all of you will recognise pretty soon the brown water quality this is what happened in two thousand and twelve it was rent one rain event in the spring instead of the eight or ten that we normally get and that was the only single event and there was not the significant snow melt because there was not last year and so we had something over the order of a twenty five year drought the summer or this year is still ongoing with the exception of last week and we've only had two events this year in total and it was a very very dry year it was the first year in thirty that lake erie didn't have a algae bloom visible from satellite lake erie three hundred miles long algae bloom this is the first year since recorded this  this satellite camera has been has been able to pick up an algae bloom in lake erie it is the first year that like mcateer like might like mica towers had an algae bloom and you might recognize some of these pictures from the summer this was like bachata of the summer and it was remarkable we had st paddy's day for about three months there where you got very very thick green algae this is what we had predicted but i had no idea it would happen so quickly as in one year in one year we turned off the water when you turn off the water you turn off the algae will die off and will go down the sediment it'll wash out the lake michigan and will take with it some of the some of the phosphate the phosphate levels measured in the lake have you'll remember the timbales study back by the state back in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight that high in phosphate and they said now it's in a drainage ditch that i've never seen a lake that high and phosphate this summer in the middle of this algae bloom on august i went out and made a measurement of twenty five in the lake because i didn't measure the algae if i measure what's there besides the algae it was down to twenty five which is the lowest it's ever been since i've been studying it ok and probably since the last sixty or eighty years we've never had an algae bloom like that because we've always had too much sediment in one dry year we changed the hydrology enough that the lake recovered enough to have an algae bloom it will continue to do this which isn't necessarily attractive especially when it dies off and smells but it shows you how quickly this watershed could recover if we could turn the water off more importantly turn the sediment off that came with it so it's a great show and tell and i had no intention of doing that this year i was intending to get another of sampling but this was even better so it shows what can happen we have also gone on to do something that's much more academic which is how to identify where that sediment comes from so i can even fine tune it more so more subdividing better than just and i can do that by putting together various indicators of how to tell soils apart and while this sounds pretty simple in practice it takes a long time we haven't quite finished this part we're still working on it but we have made progress in at least we've ruled out one area and i've got four that are working fine and one that's still under development but these are analyses there which i can look at that sediment and i can tell you where it came from and the simplest one to do is color if you have dark muck is coming from the east   and i can give you then a map of where the soil types are i can also look at elemental analysis do x ray analysis of it i can look at different elements and i can find elements that a shock or only in some soils and others it's like doing a soils map and i can use that i can also look at phosphate and this is where i see the ring of fosli coming if phosphates heavily attached to soils but i made three different types of phosphate measurements when there's total phosphate but one is water soluble phosphate ironbound phosphate and calcium phosphate so i've got these measurements of different types of phosphate i can measure the nutrient load in addition to measuring the total sediment load turns out a very similar but that's something that we had thought but now we can show that if you take all these things in one more radio dating now look at radio isotopes this this here is the presence of a short lived radioisotope a fifty two day half life really of a seven that rings out from atmospheric deposition in time it rains you get this isotope on the earth long every morning it's produced cosmetically in the atmosphere you relate that to lead to ten which is there also from atmospheric a position and the ratio of this peak which is absent in one site but presently other three gives you the ratio of how much of that sediment comes from the top soil versus bank erosion so i can tell you so it confirms the fact that when a farmer told me this ten years ago and i've gone out and you've all seen it when it rains the soil if it rains to the point the soil saturated the soil picks up and moves and that's why i cover crop practices buffer strips to stage ditches whatever you put out there to try to reduce that sediment is actually going to be the most effective removing most of our problems so each of these analytical techniques can be put together and try to identify by statistical analyses where the sediments coming from in a more specific about summarising on the sediment we know where the sediment loads originates i've got this technique for the finger printing identifying even more finely but at least now i can rank order them and that's what the donors wanted they want to know what can areas that means the best remediation practices would involve sediment traps wetland remediation more wetlands anything you can do to slow that water down at the moment we have a very what's called flashy watershed water soon it rains that rain we had this weekend the lake will be up instantly within a day or two and it should have taken a week but it doesn't it goes up instantly and it drains out again very quickly to cover crops and buffer strips are probably agricultural practices we'd like to put in  cropping means that you don't leave the seals naked over the winter you actually put a second crop on it you don't necessarily harvest it but it keeps the soil in place that the agricultural practice we should be pushing for you can also do some things like the ultimate project with a country club project we're actually putting  plains and you try to divert the water into a place where this cat tails growing slows the sediment down i'm going to finish the sediment fingerprinting development and hopefully we can then track the both the sediment phosphorus independently and have a conclusion is not to stop the high phosphate sediment first and i'm going a little long but i'll get this done quickly the microbial source tracking is a second part of water quality we've had this chart out now for you this is year from two thousand to two thousand and ten of the times that our county health department closed doesn't park doesn't park is for you know it was on the eastern most edge of lake mack and it was closed five times of the time back here and it ended up being closed seventy or eighty percent of the time back in two thousand and ten two thousand and seven they stopped closing it i have no idea why it's they need to close it so often you might as well not open it this is not good for tourism this is not good for the city to have micro know that it's something to do with equal matter in the middle in the in the lake so the question was is it animal is it human or avian or anything else like that the sampling results we went out and measured it we didn't do forty seven sites but we did seven or eleven sites five on the lake six upstream and when it was dry we got small circles when it rained we got enormous circles the circle size here the level below the level that you don't worry about is that size everything bigger you worry about when it's dry there aren't many circles when it's wet it's everywhere and in the instead of being three hundred colony forming units per hundred milliliters it was fifteen thousand that's not good ok so he was correct to close the beaches because their test just gives them that result they just get the total number and it's that picture i showed on the previous slide these little spot tests they count how many fecal indicator of bacteria are growing on their cultural cell you have to let it grow for a day and therefore they can only report the hour the results after forty eight hours and by that stage it may have gone back down again which is the problem that our all county health department facing i think closing the beach the day after it happened what you'll discover what we discovered was after every time it rained we got large events of the thousands level and when it was dry it was actually below state levels most of the time there was and what we soar by doing enough sampling was every time it rained it went up every time afterward and went back down and the equal i has a in the agricultural areas i can point out farmers again well and they transport through the watershed one to two days and they die off within six days an environment as a result of this they never reached high values in mid and west lake mack so the big baby never had any and pine creek in fact never had any it never made it out because it comes out of the creek and stops right outside the park that's where the lake first opens up from a narrow channel if you've been up that far in the lake you'll know you can almost walk across it  up at the end of where the brew is dock is it's six feet five feet deep there and then suddenly goes a twenty three feet and opens up into the bay and it stops so it takes another week or two to get out to pine creek and during that week it's all died off and if there's any wind blowing it in guess what's the first thing it's right there in the park of course that's right across the lake from where the public works as a charge so you always worried about is all that works they were very friendly to us and let us take as much sewage as we like to test and we went in there we got lots of bottles and we had all these markers that we wanted to do next the answer to just the sampling is that there must be a lot of continual sources contributing and it seems to be coming from upstream but then we got some are we actually hired somebody from michigan state that knew how to disposition if they're from you they have a human genetic marker in the color that live in your gut if it's in an animal be a cow or a pig we have specific markets now in the literature that we can use to identify whether it's pig or cow or human and even some avian now a is out there so we went sampling and we looked at all those sites that i showed you before and when it was dry we did hit some human and we did hit in two places a cow there a couple dairy for operations and it was dry but that's when the numbers were under three hundred those numbers are one hundred twenty or sixty in total counts but there wasn't human about half the sites had human leaking septic tanks elicit this charges left potties whatever happened to be there was always some human leakage because there are several hundred thousand humans living around here however when it rained that fifteen thousand count the came down was not any human market found in any of them it was not any pig marker found in a home and there was not ninety percent of our data come from something we couldn't identify and it doesn't seem to be avian and wild animals just don't poop only when it rains i mean basically the then made no sense ok so then we went and we looked up the literature and we found what i think is the most likely source and we've proven that in some sense we have a small smoking gun now the coil coming from a development we've done in out of regions is a tile drain installation drains because you want to get the corn in the soil which is grown around here actually has wet roots if you have a wet spring so the corn will get started less profit so if you put in the p v c pipe about four feet down and you just drain the water away from the roots even if you get a wet spring the crops will grow about thirty percent yield more which is good for farmers ok and it pushes the water out a little quicker but it's actually cleaner doesn't take sediment with it it's actually a good practice what happened though is that these tile drains when it rains are all connected and it's an out of the out of u v light and out of the sunlight and it is continuously running a trickle of nutrients throw off the field so at some point many years ago heat that kills me on the way from cold it kills me and i have a trickle of nutrients running by if i adjust my diet to eat what's coming through the tube i can live so they became a row because they can do and they say they can become an dodgin as they live outside the mammalian gut which is pretty rare it's been reported before up in lake superior but nobody's ever done it on the whole system like we've got and it appears that the majority of our eco ally is coming from this source it no longer has a genetic signature of a cow or pig or human or anything avian that we found so far ok so it has its own signature and it seems to be a new organism it's an eco lie that sets off the scales being equal i it's closely related they call it might not be exactly alike even we've discovered recently but it is something that is related to it it probably came from in your applications originally but we looked at some random tile drains this spring and we had a beautiful spring it was warm we were out there in february if you call that spring we were able to get seventy degree day and seventy three seven degree day in february it was amazing and the microbial life started flourishing again and we took to  drains from a farmer that was friendly who told us which field he put manure on it when you're on this last august and he hadn't put manure on this field in six years there were five thousand counts coming out of both tyler and the limit is three hundred so that means those eco i were there in march at five thousand levels coming out of specific tile drain imagine that now watershed wide the biggest increase we've done in the last ten years is the tile drain once the farmers found out how profitable is and tile rains have always been here but they always i mean those old clay tiles from the forty's and they farm district around here has all these pipes and it's affectively and this is a quote you'll remember for a while it's effectively like living ten thousand miles of artificial intestine and the bugs can live in it now the good news from that is that these bugs are probably not pathogenic to humans that means they're probably not a human health hazard it's like swimming you should never swim in human waste and you shouldn't swim in animal waste because animals share so much with us but it's not as bad to swim in animal waste these so the test was positive a negative but the answer is that the equal i was seeing is coming from what we think is a tile drain and is this growth that lives on the inside of these tile drains within weeks this growth occurs it's black so it's not algae it's not growing from sunlight it's staying hidden from sunlight which actually will kill it off it washes out every time there's a rain event and of course all these types are connected so if it ever grew in one it's now connected to all the and that's how we think it's propagat is brand new it's been observed in other places but not extensively like we have it and we think that this is probably going to be adopted by many other a lot of people are going to be interested in looking this in their own sign looking valley has it out and out in california we believe it's all over the place in the midwest because this is a fairly new technology how should you monitor for this maybe we shouldn't be doing the modern test we're doing are these pathogenic are they dangerous or not and how can you get rid of them again all good questions none of which i have a good answer for you can take a rotary rinse and clean it out you could put u v light up there probably clean it out you can treat with chemicals that doesn't sound good on a chemist but even that  you don't want that many chemicals in the environment and the question is maybe don't need to maybe it's a natural population we've grown but it isn't harmful those are all things that we need to be done conclusion plus live what are we going to do with the data that we've collected we are going to pursue the eco live more our own we've got more studies to do on that and we're going to publish like raising a lot of people are going to be very interested in studying that more and all those three questions i just left you there i need to be answered the sediment i'm not going to study more but i'm going to have now provided that data back to people that want like to reduce sediment the the it may not be biofilm it may be dirt embedded in the biofilm dirt has a lot more surface area that these critters can live on it could be dirt as opposed biofilms in the cells but it's some combination that probably is related to the eagle eye but the two sediment and e coli are not necessarily directly related but i think that the same fix for the sediment will also fix a lot of the well i think it's coming from these fields if we have identified eight or six more properties that could potentially be taken out of service this is owned by hayworth a lot hundred acres here that they would be willing to take out of there not just running the field out to farmers at the moment and they would be willing to take that out and make it into a park and negotiations going on going as to what the value of that would be and if you made it into a park could you make a wetlands out of it shore so you could imagine doing this with partnerships with water resources institute a grand valley state i know they're working on a discussion of that they're working with the donors again and again to look at what would cost to do this the study itself was expensive but the cleanup would be a lot more costly of course and so that's what's going on with these data it was a tremendous tremendous effort to give you an idea of how rare these data are there's aren't any other watersheds in michigan that have this quality of data that they could look at and say gee what could i spend my money on they look at other things the rouge river has a water group and they've got a lot of contaminants of mercury and lead running down the river so they're very focused on that they've got huge days on that and the valley watersheds got some issues that they're looking at but this is a small watershed relatively and we have very very few pollutants there's no heavy there's no b c b s that are down in kalamazoo river white lakes loaded with chrome and other types of organics so we're very lucky in the sense we don't have industrial pollutants we just have this very hard to remediate non point source pollution but now we have an idea where it's coming from and we can remediation it'll cost money but it can be done and it will have an effect and the only evidence i can say for that is look what happened in one year without water if we just stop the rain we're all set for that we'll have other issues  but if we could now make the rain come off the land without taking soil with it you have a chance to get your lake green first but after a couple of years that green will go away there are treatments you can make to get the algae down and off the allergies flushed out once or twice the phosphate levels will come back to normal lake and that lake will recover and that's the good news for you guys that are thinking strategically for the city of holland and surrounding townships what could you do with a cleaner lake in terms of both attracting business and residential uses of the lake the lake itself is is remarkably quickly recovering its cycles all the water in the lake every four months so if we could stop putting phosphate in in a year you could get reduced levels very quickly my guess is that this is going to take generations to clean up and the more i study it the more i'm convinced that if we do the right thing it won't take that long it can be done in probably a decade a less if we do it right but that will cost money but the donors i'm frightened about raising money for this and so they're off thinking about that transport so late time is a little bit lucky in the sense that it's got more of the sand soils and less agriculture compared to some of the other townships out there and again i want to be very careful not to blame farmers for this we've worked with a partner with a lot of farmers to do this study and it's not necessarily them that's causing soil loss it's this starkly usage of this land as farmland and we don't want to turn it all into concrete either i mean we could just pave this area and turn it into and that wouldn't be good either because in the water goes even more rapidly so i want to be very careful not to blame any farmers i think farmers can do their job by cover cropping and by putting buffer strips and things like that and they're being encouraged to do so the macas an active grant and some other people working on that but it's not just a farm issue it's all of our issues and there's also nutrients coming in if you put in a housing development the first thing people do is they want green lawns so they put down fertilizer that also gets in the lake and so clearly if we you have to think about land use as well as of the strategies but we think we have a technical strategy to reduce the sedimentation and i think that will go a long way to putting like mac back to where it came the other thing that i have to leave you with is lake mack is not going to have a sandy shoreline beach that's clear water that looks like the tropics it doesn't look like sandra pay here and it never will even if we clear it back to what lake mack used to look like and that's the common question what i'd like you used to look like when the settlers came it was a clearly you could see to the bottom ok but the bottom was black because it had a lot of  do when they lose their leaves they put them on the lake and they sink after a couple of weeks and they go to the bottom and they turn black with sand and so that's and that's a healthy lake it was a high fish population lake it still is a high fish populations as the fish populations are right for a carpet sheep it right now the small fish and then they die but the old days there are a reported instances of muscular he being in this life has got me and so will it go back to being pre settlement no but we can get it back to a stage where the water you can actually see through it and there shouldn't be algae blooms like we see it should get back we should be where lake erie is thirty years from now ok i don't know if that's a goal but it's one of those comparisons that you can make that these leaks will recover but it takes time and a lot of coordinated effort to get the  ally and we should also mention the philanthropic efforts of some of the private citizens which has always been a big part holland of the private sector coming alongside the public we appreciate your work and i think you