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21 February 2022
Muddy Water Has Town Official Singing the Blues
Coastwatch GLERL NOAA imagery December 17, 2021 (annotated). Several years ago, when our kids were young and at least one was still in elementary school, I visited a class of 3rd graders taught by a friend of the family’s and put on a soil erosion demonstration. The “show and tell” consisted of setting up rainfall simulators for two contrasting land cover types represented by two baking pans: one filled with …
30 June 2019
“Fairy Rings” or “Hexinringe” and the Role of Fungi in Weathering and Soil Fertility
As our three-year old chocolate-golden Labrador mix looks happiest when he’s running, we try to get him out to a park once or twice a day. While he’s chasing noisy killdeer and attacking discarded plastic water bottles, I have a chance to look at the land and sky and assess the progress of the new growing season. In springtime, at one of the parks near our home in Lenawee County, …
19 May 2018
Prairie Woody Encroachment, Fire Ecology, and Implications for Regional Hydrology
Images of modern prairie burns near Council Bluffs, Kansas have been captured by venerable National Geographic photojournalist Jim Richardson. These fires aimed at maintaining prairie grassland ecology carry on a Native American practice that goes back centuries. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln hosts an online archive of The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in which George Clark, who probably never won a spelling bee, recorded this remarkable river scene …
16 February 2018
Chemical Cocktails Confound Phosphorus Management
It’s been fifty years since the Canadian government at the urging of the International Joint Commission set aside the Experimental Lakes Area near Kenora, Ontario in 1968 to conduct large-scale experiments in aquatic ecology. There, the young Director named David W. Schindler, who would go on to become a world-renown limnologist, and others conducted experiments with nutrient loading and produce one of the most iconic photos in the field of …
8 September 2017
Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Ag Programs Under Review
The Great Lakes Commission (GLC) has received a two-year $750,000 grant to evaluate the effectiveness of money spent on farm conservation programs by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). In addition to the GLC, Ohio State University and Michigan State University will play a role in the evaluation process. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration proposed to end funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and National Sea Grant programs. …
1 September 2017
Life in the Soil: The Lizard and the Fire Ant
After a slow, plodding climb up a steep hill in West Virginia, the miogeocline side of the Apallachian mountains, I sat down on a log to catch my breath when, soon, this gregarious creature skittered toward me and, seemingly, looked me straight in the eye. This eastern fence lizard (Sceloporus undulatus) was about seven inches long, and out in full sunshine near the edge of a clearing. It was a …
31 March 2017
Wetlands and Flood Mitigation: The 10 Percent Solution
Following the Great Flood of 1993, an official report called for more research to find ways to prevent flood devastation, apparently unaware the problem had been mostly solved, conceptually over a decade earlier. But taking action through the implementation of a national wetland restoration program has faced intractable political and economic obstacles.
18 February 2017
Keep Your Shirt On, Save Some Coral?
This is not great news, especially for those of us who like to be out in the sun but get really bad sunburns. As reported by Nature and Scientific American, Hawaii state senator Will Espero has introduced a bill to ban sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate, two chemicals that may pose risks to us, such as endocrine disruption, as well as to coral. The Environmental Working Group maintains lists of …
22 December 2016
Maine Shake Map Using Surficial Geology and Crowd-Source Responses
Researchers in Maine (Marvinney and Glover 2015) have created a clever earthquake risk shake map using readily available surficial geology maps and online responses from state residents. Did you feel it? That is the name of a USGS Earthquake Hazards Program interactive website that “collects information from people who felt an earthquake and creates maps that show what people experienced and the extent of damage.” I first became interested in …
30 September 2016
Lake Erie Algae Blooms Correlate to June Rainfall
June precipitation appears to be positively correlated to algae blooms in Lake Erie. Looking at monthly precipitation data readily-available from Weather Underground and comparing it to the Western Lake Erie Algae Bloom Severity Index, I was surprised by the strength of the correlation (0.6, 0.85 with an “outlier” removed). June precipitation was the only month to correlate to the Severity Index in my data set and I was surprised that …
John Freeland earned a PhD in Soil Science (Pedology) at North Dakota State University and is a consultant working in the private sector. He has published soils research and taught at the high school and college levels. John is interested in wetlands, soil genesis, science communication, the intersection of art and science, and soil-water-landscape processes. John lives near the Ohio-Michigan border and plays bass in multiple music projects.