Vermont Environmental Consortium

April 24, 2007
Water Scientists Provide A Sure Sign of Spring
by
Daniel Hecht

As you look around for signs of spring, keep an eye out for an interesting critter that’s likely to be spotted in the evening in lower, wetter areas. They often wear billed caps and tall rubber boots, and can be seen standing amid the brown grass and snow-crushed reeds, staring at the ground.

Along with the animals that emerge when the snow melts, water scientists such as those at Pioneer Environmental Associates come out to study the object of their expertise.

Jeff Nelson, who founded Pioneer in 1996, took his degree in Geology from UVM, but soon gravitated toward surface water study. Now based in Vergennes, his team of scientists and technicians assesses waterways and ecosystems, models impacts of human activities, and designs solutions to problems.

Water is the lifeblood of the land, so Vermont’s waterways and wetlands are particularly important. Besides irrigating forests and fields, they nurture animals and plants that influence the environment far beyond the borders of their habitat.

Water also has the mostly thankless job of rinsing clean the land – which means that by-products of human activities end up in streams and rivers and settle in slow-moving, shallow areas, damaging ecosystems.

This time of year, those rubber-booted figures are probably conducting population counts of amphibians. In spring, frogs and salamanders squirm out of the muck and migrate to the puddles left over after snow melt, to breed. Highly sensitive to pollutants, they provide clues to the health of aquatic ecosystems.

Or the Pioneer folks may be doing wetland delineation – determining just where a wetland is and is not. It’s an important question, because wetlands are protected by special regulations that acknowledge their importance to the larger environment. Delineation requires slogging about in wet areas, tangling through brush and reeds to sample plants, soil, and water, assessing them according to federal and state criteria, and mapping findings to discern where the needs of nature collide with the needs of humans.

Designing restorative action plans for damaged wetlands is another specialized science. This requires re-establishing the natural geometry of bottoms and banks -- dredging, replacing streambed gravel, shoring up edges with boulders, and establishing buffer vegetation along banks. One of Pioneer’s most exciting recent projects has been participating in the Lake Champlain Clean and Clear Act Wetlands Restoration plan, a sweeping program to reduce phosphorous and silt run-off into the lake.

Another assessment procedure is the “macroinvertebrate kick net study”: dragging a fine net along a waterway bottom to collect insect larvae – those little alien monsters with innumerable wriggling appendages. Jeff’s team identifies and counts larvae of mayfly, stonefly, and others because they’re key indicators of ecosystem health. Their vitality affects the fish, birds, and mammals that depend on them for food.

“Periphytic artificial substrates analysis”? That’s studying the plants attached to bottom materials, typically a signal of wastewater discharge providing abnormal nutrient conditions.

For “multiple pass electrofishing,” Jeff’s intrepid staff cordons off a section of waterway and zaps electricity through the water. The shock stuns fish (temporarily – they’re released unharmed) so that they can be counted and measured. With data on fish, Pioneer can assess the impact of road building, snow making, farm practices, and building construction.

Pioneer Environmental belongs to an environmental industry segment called, with stunning vagueness, the “C&E” – consulting and engineering – segment. Firms specializing in watershed protection often perform a tightrope act, balancing the imperative of environmental preservation with pressure from human activity.

For the Potash Brook project, the City of South Burlington hired Pioneer to study wetlands and waterways in one of Vermont’s busiest places. Burlington Airport, I-89, malls, housing developments: All had to be incorporated into a plan that would accommodate human activity but preserve the viability of the water ecosystem. It’s a hard job, especially since it invites flack from every ideological quarter.

Jeff feels that there have been big improvements during the last decade, as point-source pollution has been reduced, public awareness has increased, and practices have improved. Still, he warns, we’re constantly building more houses and malls, improving roads, fertilizing our fields. These bleed off nutrients that promote suffocating algae growth and mineral matter that smothers waterway bottoms. Silt impairs those homely macroinvertebrates, and the ecosystemic shock reverberates up the food chain to, say, trout. And to us.

“The human population is not going to go away,” Jeff says, “so we need to find ways to allow people and ecosystems to co-exist.” He takes pride in doing the detective work and the hands-on labor needed to accomplish this. But he warns that the coming decade will be crucial to preserving our living waterways: “There are still major issues to be confronted. We need to take these concerns and turn them into constructive actions.”

In this era of dense, hyperactive human populations, those rubber-booted marsh-gazers have likely assumed a permanent role in Vermont’s water ecosystems.

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Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information on any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu.

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