Carrie Schuman on the Conservancy of SWFL's release of nature-based Flood Resilience Blueprint

This is Gulf Coast Life I’m Mike Kiniry Thanks for joining us. The U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, is the federal government's primary science and natural resource resource research agency. It's part of the Department of the interior. The USGS has no regulatory or land management authority. Its sole mission is to collect impartial scientific data, monitor conditions, and conduct research. It operates thousands of stream gauges, well monitors and sampling stations that track real time river flow, groundwater levels, and water quality. It also monitors and issues alerts for active natural threats, produces topographic maps and elevation models, and studies fish, wildlife, health, invasive species and habitat changes to support conservation and fisheries management, and assesses the location, quality and abundance of mineral energy and soil resources across the country. Lots of geological science. In other words, since the late 1990s, the primary model or tool they use to estimate how pollutants primarily nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, how they move through from the land into streams and rivers, has been what's called the Sparrow model. That stands for spatially reference to regression on watershed attributes. New research details a new kind of sparrow model that improves or extends the understanding of nutrient pollution by accounting for what's called storage lag, meaning legacy nutrients stored in soils or groundwater for longer than one season before entering streams, and how those lagged nutrients are impacting water quality across the United States. Joining me today to help us understand what all that means is the lead author of this newly published research. Olivia Miller is a research hydrologist with the US Geological Survey. Welcome to the show, Olivia. Hey, thanks for having me. How did I do with that sort of top level description of what USGS is and what this, that the new Sparrow model versus the old Sparrow model. How did I do on that? Those. Great. Okay, good. I always want to make sure that I didn't just say something wrong right off the bat before I start talking with somebody who's an expert. So how long have you been with USGS and kind of what brought you down this research path yourself? Yeah. I really started working for the USGS, about ten years ago, as I was finishing up grad school. But I started as a volunteer, after I finished college, and I was trying to kind of figure out different career paths and I volunteered in the Utah Water Science Center, and I fell in love with the work that they do. It's a lot of water science to help, manage water resources better. And I, I got into it. I think my interest was really, I love the natural world. I love being outside, and everybody uses water. And I, I thought it would be just very rewarding to be in a in a field where you help, figure out information so that we are make smart decisions about our our water. Can you describe the traditional sparrow model? In radio listener friendly terms? Yes. So the Sparrow model, it takes, information that we collect all kinds of monitoring sites across the country in rivers. So people go out and they, collect a water sample, and they send it to a lab, and we measure, the water quality. So in this case, nutrients. So, nitrogen and phosphorus, those may be familiar words if you do gardening, those are fertilizers. And so we go out and, and we, we measure what, how much of those nutrients are in streams across the whole country. And the Sparrow model takes that kind of information. And then it looks at information on what's going on in the landscape. What is the, land cover or land use? How much rain do we get in different areas? And it figures out these relationships between what we're seeing in the stream, what's happening on the landscape. And so it, it, you know, it's kind of a fancy calculator for figuring out how much of those nutrients are applied on the landscape, move into the rivers and then it routes all of those nutrients through the rivers so you can track. Okay, it went in at this place and then it moved down the down the river system. And then we sampled we measure it here. And the kind of previous, models looked at those at how that was happening over kind of long term average conditions. So you would sort of get a, big picture idea of what the major sources are and how, nutrients varied in space, you know, across the landscape. One of the really exciting new developments is that we, have updated the models to account for the fact that sometimes you put nutrients on the landscape, and it takes a while for them to get into rivers. And so we can when we did that, we, we now have the ability to look at how nutrients have changed over time. So it's a pretty, I think, exciting, advancement in that, you know, you can now look at how things have changed or, you know, are there different times of the year when certain sources are more important or not in different places? So you can, test or have people test the water? How do you determine, like what kind of nutrients are put on land where, if that makes sense? Yeah. We gather a lot of different data sets on, you know, fertilizer applications, where different certain crops are grown. And so we kind of give all of those data sets to the model, and the model says, oh, hey, there's a lot of, you know, fertilizer application in this area. And that, translates into certain amounts of nutrients in the streams, or there's a big urban area here, or there's a, wastewater treatment plant here, and that's kind of providing that the nutrients that get into streams. So it's it's we collect data, we use data sets, on lots of different things all over the landscape. Understood. So how was this new model like, did you did you have an additional data set or data sets, or were you able to apply new techniques to existing data in order to get this? This new dynamic model, I think is how it's called. Yeah, yeah. We, eat them up a lot as a new data set. So all of the, you know, kind of in the past, we would use, you know, average river conditions. I was talking about the samples, so we would kind of take averages of those. And this we kind of had to, go through and identify all of the sites that had, data over the whole study period. And so, you know, it's kind of looking at like, oh, this site has, you know, 20 years of, of sampling data. We can use that. So it was it was very, very data processing intensive. But that's one of the strengths of the model is that it's taking so much different information, over such a large area, and it can learn those different relationships in different places where maybe you have low nutrients and streams in one place and it learns, okay, in these kinds of land cover and weather conditions and soil properties, this, this, you get low nutrients. And then in other areas where you have high, you know, nutrients with different kinds of land cover, different soil properties, different weather patterns. You get a different loading into the streams. Safe to assume that, like in machine learning, generative, a, huge data science, stuff like that is all part of y'all's process these days. You know, it's slightly different than, like, a machine learning model, but it's very data intensive. It's very data and, you know, data driven model. It's kind of, in the modeling world, we talk about like a process based model. On one side or like, you know, and, and I might model on the other side and how, you know, squares a little bit in the middle. So we do have some process information that, you know, we know, like, we, we, we, maintain, you know, the same amount of nutrients that goes into streams has to stay in there and there's processes that can remove that from the streams. But we're not like, creating or losing mass for no reason. So we have this mass balance constraint that we maintain that, so it's a, it's a it's kind of an intermediary between the process model and that and model. Understood. So this new paper or research estimates total nitrogen and total phosphorus loading across the entire car terminus. Is that how you say it in the United States? That was a new word for me, I guess is that just means not Alaska or Hawaii. Yeah, not Puerto Rico. None of the, Pacific Islands. So is this a data set that now policymakers and everybody can look at and researchers and people maybe at universities can can dig into. Yeah, it's all publicly available. There's, like links to the data sets in that paper. And so, yeah, anyone can go in and use these data sets. We're also we have plans. The USGS has this, it's called the Data Companion, and it's a way to access, like, national scale model results. And so these data, the Sparrow results are going to go into that, in the next couple of months. And that's going to be nice because there's going to be some mapping interactive mappers that people could go and like zoom into a certain area that they're interested and, look at some other results in more detail. So we're excited about that. The model accounts for you've mentioned this and we've alluded to it, storage lag, which I guess means nutrients that are in soils, you know, that don't wind up in the water right away. I'm not a water scientist, but it seems like that would be something that would be on y'all's radar all along. I mean, has it been but just not, detailed in such a specific way as what this model can do? Yeah, we've definitely known that this is something that happens, for a long time, it was really just figuring out how to implement it in our model. And, you know, so that was kind of it was a sort of technical, difficulty to overcome. So, yeah, we're very pleased that the fact that we could do that. Who collects the data? From what I read, it seems like you guys maybe have some partners who are. Because it looks like you are collecting data from, like, 263,000 locations or something like that. How does that all work? Yeah. So we have this. Incredible. This is one of the I love this about the USGS. We have offices all over the country that have, you know, staff dedicated to going out and sampling. And we have a lot of really, standardized procedures for collecting data and the laboratory analysis that everything happens, you know, everything's kind of happening the same way across the whole country so that you can take these data, these data sets and, think, you know, you know, okay, this is a good you know, I know that this is a good sample, that the results are comparable to, data collected in a different place, even at a different time. You know, sampling techniques can change, and we do a lot of work to make sure that things are comfortable. So there's just, hundreds, thousands of staff, that go out and collect these data sets, you know, these samples. And we have large databases where that's all stored and it's all publicly available. So anyone can go in and get these data. Do you guys, you know, the analogy analogy down here, we have like, the Calusa water keeper is our local water keeper organization, and they have volunteers who are collecting water samples. Is that is there any overlap between what you all do in them, or is that just another example of collecting data for water? Yeah, we do use a lot of, data from the it's called the water quality portal. And that is, like it's an EPA and USGS database and so that includes data that different state agencies collect. And so, you know, we that is really important information for us to use as well. Let's talk a little bit about what this new data is showing. We have a lot of water in this country that has, you know, too much nutrients in it's it's kind of, put simply, correct. There are ways too much nutrients is, you know, that's a depends on who you're asking. But. Higher than what we may wish for if we if we had a perfect world. Yeah. We, you know, part of our analysis was comparing, you know, the, the nutrient concentrations in streams to kind of threshold concentrations. So just some level that is relevant for, ecological systems and streams. And we, we certainly identified a lot of places where, nutrient concentrations are frequently above those thresholds and that, you know, can have impacts on those, ecological communities. It looked like maybe the Midwest was one of the hot spots, if we can put it that way. I'm just trying to imagine, you know, the way watersheds work, water comes down and it has to make its way to something. And I guess the bigger the watershed, the more chance nutrients are going to wind up in the water there. Is that a simple way to put it? Yeah, certainly. Area is important. A larger watershed can definitely, yield more nutrients. You know, it also depends what's going on in that watershed. You know, a large watershed with, you know, know people who might not have them and need nutrients. Or, you know, compared to even a smaller watershed that has, you know, a wastewater treatment plant or, a lot of intensive agriculture. So it's it's a mixture of both. And, you know, also it kind of depends on how much, you know, one thing that our model really showed is that, you know, the if you, if you have a wet place that, you know, really moves a lot of nutrients into the streams and this isn't, new or surprising, we've definitely known that before. But, you know, the the weather conditions can also really influence how much how much nutrients you have in your rivers. Are the primary sources of nutrients. The things that would be obvious to people, especially down here, like, you know, agriculture and wastewater and things like that. Yep, yep. Agriculture wastewater, atmospheric deposition in some places. And I think one of the, you know, one of the things that our, our study really showed is that, the kind of that lag delivery of all these non-point sources, they're not treated wastewater that goes directly into the stream. So there's no lag on that, but all the lag delivery of, of all of those other non-point sources, is a really substantial, kind of pathway for nutrients to get to streams. And that's a mixture of all of those sources. But, you know, so some of some of those sources, you know, runoff into a river in, you know, a relatively short time season in this model. And some of it takes much longer to get into streams. Is testing able to tell what the initial source of phosphorus or nitrogen was there a difference? On some sort of molecular level between nitrogen that came from agriculture versus nitrogen that came from wastewater? You know, there are some ways that you can do that there, like nitrogen isotope studies. And they look at different kind of flavors of nitrogen and in some cases you can separate out what the sources are. We didn't do that in this study. It would be really, a great kind of follow on or comparison if we had a, you know, a data set for the whole country of, of, of that kind of chemistry information. But yeah, there are some, you know, and that's really, in done really successfully in some kind of smaller scale areas where you can kind of, do you, you have to do a lot of sampling of, you know, different sources of, of nutrients to streams, and then you kind of can figure out, okay, what I, what I see in the river is similar to what I see in, you know, source A or source B, based on the kind of specific chemistry. If you had to guess, do you think that lies in our future when it comes to water science? I mean, you know, having the ability to, you know, say, well, there's there's nutrients in this water and we know where it came from. Yeah. I think, you know, on a kind of small scale that can definitely that can definitely be a really valuable study. That's those kind of chemistry studies are typically done, you know, in a specific area where they're really trying to figure out, we don't know where this is coming from. And we need to reduce reduced nutrients. And so we need to figure out exactly what the source of this is. You know, this model is kind of a different approach for getting it that it's working big picture, you know, large scale. What are the major sources? You know, we can we can look in the model results and see, okay, in this area, you know, these are the really important sources of nutrients to streams in, you know, different part of the country. You know, you might get, like, kind of a different source portfolio of, of what's contributing nutrients. So there's kind of different ways of getting at that question. And it kind of depends on, you know, what you're trying to do with that information. So if you're if you're trying to kind of remediate, once you know, a small watershed, you might really want to do that, you know, really focused study. Whereas the study's kind of big picture, what are the sources, how they how are things changing? Where where are, you know, where are certain sources important or not? Is there? I'm trying to imagine a way to have stations in rivers that are collecting this kind of nutrient information without having to have, you know, staff or volunteers going out and picking up a sample of water and sending it to a lab. Is that something that is either being hoped for or possibly even happening on some small scale at this point? Yeah, definitely. That's a great question. We do have, you know, instream kind of continuous nitrate sensors in some places. It's certainly not as extensive monitoring as we do. You know, just with these, these sampling events, and, but yeah, in some places that's a really important, method for monitoring water quality in streams. That's something I've always when I talk to water managers and whatnot down here, I've always imagined a future where they could just have a big map of all of South Florida that has real time data on water quality, water level, everything. You know, it seems like that could possibly happen someday if the right resources and effort was put toward it. Yeah, yeah, that would I. That sounds like a dream to me. So what does this all mean in terms of, like, who's going to use this data? Are we talking water managers? Are we talking policymakers? Are we talking like. Like who? You know, other than fellow hydrologists like yourself? Like who who is going to be tapping into this data as, as you move forward with this research? Yeah. That's, you know, I think that's a really important question. We so there are many, many states, more than half of the states use, past Sparrow models to manage or to, you know, can in their water quality management plans. So it's a lot of, a lot of times it states, or, or other federal agencies as well. They'll use the, the model results to say, okay, these are areas where we have high nutrient yields. These might be areas and we know the sources here. So we might want to target certain kinds of management activities here. So we you know we're really hoping you know, these new these new models are much more current and past models. They include how things have changed over time. So it's, you know, a lot more kind of detailed information and a lot more, current information that, you know, water managers, other scientists, can use, to kind of plan their, their nutrient management strategies. And I think you said it's not quite ready yet, but at some point we may be able to pull up a map of our listening area and go look at the those those two decades and see where nutrients is and where it moved and stuff like that. Yep. Yeah. Any idea of a timeline on that? We are hoping for, early next, next year. It's kind of our goal. And is there anything next for this research besides like that mapping and stuff like that in terms of like what you hope to improve upon next? Yeah, we so it's just these are standard 2020. And so we actually are starting work to extend them further, further out in time. So that's I'm looking forward to doing that I understand. Okay. Well we are unfortunately out of time. Olivia Olivia Miller is a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the lead author on this new paper titled Seasonal Estimates of Nutrient Loading Sources and Impacts on Water Availability and Streams Across the Country, United States, 2000 to 2020. Thank you so much for your time, Olivia. Thank you. My pleasure. You find links to this research on our website WGC U Dawgs SCL. You can find all of our past shows there as well. Our show today was produced by yours truly with production help from Matt Krause for now. Thanks for listening. I’m Mike Kiniry, this is WGCU FM Fort Myers 90.1 WMKO Marco Island 91.7 FM, NPR for Southwest Florida.