The Coastal Management Fellowship was established to provide on-the-job education and training opportunities in coastal resource management and policy for postgraduate students and to provide project assistance to state coastal zone management programs. The program matches postgraduate students with state coastal zone programs to work on projects proposed by the state.
Starting in August, Monica will be working with the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management, aiding in the assessment of the hazard vulnerability for communities living on the coast, and their needs for support in improving their resilience. She received a Master’s degree in public affairs from Indiana University this past spring.
“I am incredibly excited to be a part of this fellowship, and more specifically to be a part of the project in North Carolina. My graduate studies focused on social and ecological resilience in the face of a rapidly changing environment, with a focus on vulnerable coastal communities,” said Monica.
“This fellowship is a dream come true!”
Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant is a part of University of Illinois Extension and Purdue Extension.
The Wilmette buoy returned to Lake Michigan earlier this week. But a few days before it departed, several of its biggest admirers stopped by to meet it at Lloyd Park in Winnetka, Illinois.
Wil, as some of the IISG scientists call it, lay prone in the parking lot withstanding the blustery winds and cold temperatures. The ugly weather didn’t stop the 10 or so Chicago-area sailors from coming to the open house, leaning in close and examining the body of the machine they’ve come to rely on after only one season.
One remarked at how much smaller it was than he thought. Others stood and posed with it for pictures.
It’s hard not to anthropomorphize the buoy. Once in the water, the weather and lake condition data and images it provides are like sage advice coming from a reliable friend.
“I’m with the Glencoe Boat Club and we were excited when it was put in,” Eric Brislawn of Buffalo Grove, Illinois said. “We’ve been watching data on it all summer and using it. We—the boaters, the sailors up here—had nothing like this anywhere nearby…so this really filled a nice gap for weather information.”
The buoy might not have made it in the water without the help of Laurie Morse of Glencoe, Illinois, who along with Purdue University, helped secure a grant to fund it.
“We have already noticed since it’s been in the water since 2015 that it’s made a difference in the quality of our marine forecast and it’s really important to all us recreational boaters,” said Morse, who was with her husband at the open house.
“Well, we look for it in the water,” Morse remarked. “I’ve never been successful in finding it on the lake, but this is the first time I’ve seen the buoy. So this is very exciting.”
Jay Beugly, IISG aquatic ecology specialist, and scientists Ed Verhamme and John Bratton from LimnoTech, organized the open house and were on hand to talk about all the nearshore environmental-sensing this bright yellow, 610-pound buoy is capable of.
“We were happy that people came with lots of questions. Some didn’t know much about it. Others followed it closely last year,” said Beugly. “This is the first full season that this buoy will be deployed, and we want people to know that it’s out there. We were excited to be able to stand next to the buoy while it’s out of the water and talk to folks and see how we might improve their experience.”
Every spring, The Sun Foundation invites students, teachers, community leaders, and the general public to attend the Clean Water Celebration at the Peoria Civic Center. Through engaging hands-on activities and exhibits, this gathering encourages students and the public to learn how to improve water quality, to think critically and creatively about water conservation issues, and to protect and sustain our natural resources.
IISG educators, Terri Hallesy and Kirsten Walker, challenged students to tackle the issue of Asian carp invading new areas through IISG’s “Stop Asian Carp in Their Tracks” activity, a video about Asian carp in Illinois, and the website Nab the Aquatic Invader!
Presenters shared information about how this troublesome invader competes with native fish by eating lots of phytoplankton and zooplankton, the base of the food chain. Students learned how carp – which can weigh up to 60 pounds – become startled by boat motors and jump out of the water, smacking nearby boaters and anglers.
In small groups, students also discussed the location of Asian carp’s native habitat, how they arrived in the Midwest, and strategies to help reduce their populations. Students gained an understanding about the ways in which invasive species are introduced, the competitive advantages they have in their new ecosystems, and their huge impact on an area’s natural biodiversity.
As a result of these activities, students were equipped as agents for change to engage family and community members in understanding how they, too, can play an important role in stopping the spread of aquatic invaders.
Do you have expired or unused medicine sitting around your house? How you choose to get rid of those drugs could hurt our waterways.
“Research has shown that there can be negative effects to animal health and reproduction from pharmaceuticals that haven’t been removed from wastewater,” said Sarah Zack, the pollution prevention extension specialist for Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant. “Wastewater treatment plants weren’t designed to remove many of the compounds getting into them.”
So, how should you get rid of your drugs? Instead of putting medicines in the trash or flushing them in the toilet, bring them to National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day 10 a.m.-2 p.m. April 30. There are 310 sites in Illinois and 135 sites in Indiana. The day is being hosted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and people can find the nearest drop off location on the DEA’s website.
There is a large and growing body of research available about the environmental impacts of pharmaceuticals in waterways, but any potential long-term human health impacts are not yet clear. So in the meantime, making sure we properly dispose of unwanted medications is a good bet.
“There are other reasons besides just water quality for making sure that your medicines are disposed of properly,” Zack said, adding that pets and children can get into unused medicines around the house.
Besides taking medicine to take back programs, Zack said people should make sure they’re communicating with their physicians about getting the appropriate quantities of medicine.
“Don’t take a 90-day supply of a medicine if a 30-day supply is sufficient,” Zack said.
Being cognizant of what’s in your medicine cabinet and being willing to say “no,” to samples of medication you don’t need are other ways to decrease the amount of prescription drugs you own.
More than 5.5 million pounds of pills have been collected since the event was created in 2010, according to the DEA’s website. Pills and patches may be dropped off, but the program cannot accept liquids or needles or sharps. The day is free and anonymous.
“It’s really important that we have these events to give the public an opportunity to ensure that they are being responsible with medicines,” Zack said.
If you are interested in setting up a permanent medicine disposal site in your local police station, contact Sarah Zack. You can also reach here on Twitter:@SarahAZack.
Ali Braboy is a senior studying journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Do you have questions about Lake Michigan monitoring? Or do you just want to see a buoy up close? Come visit the Wilmette Buoy Open House on April 26 from 5-7 p.m. at Lloyd Park in Winnetka, Illinois!
Jay Beugly, IISG aquatic ecology specialist and Ed Verhamme, project engineer from LimnoTech will be on hand to talk about all the nearshore environmental-sensing this bright yellow, 610-pound buoy is capable of.
“We’re happy to answer questions about anything people are interested in,” said Beugly. “This is the first full season that this buoy will be deployed, and we want people to know that it’s out there. We’re also excited to be able to stand next to the buoy while it’s out of the water and talk to folks and see how we might improve their experience.”
The buoy—once launched later in the week—will be moored roughly four miles off the coast of Wilmette, Illinois. From May to October, it relays information on wind speed, air and water temperature, wave height and direction, and other environmental characteristics each year.
Current lake conditions are updated every 10 minutes and are available at the IISG Wilmette Buoy page. Photos (taken once per hour during daylight) and video footage is available at the LimnoTech Webcam gallery. The mobile-friendly sites highlight conditions of particular interest to recreational users, such as wave height, wind speed, and surface water temperature.
Information collected from the buoys is also fed into the National Data Buoy Center operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Great Lakes Buoy offers more localized information.
Forecasters, researchers, and others can download raw historical data for Michigan City buoy ID 45170 or Wilmette buoy ID 45174 from any of these websites.
This event is free and the public are encouraged to attend!
The Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs) in the Environment conference at the I Hotel in Champaign, Illinois on Monday welcomed dozens of researchers, officials, academics, and high school students. The 10 students from Pontiac High School in Illinois understood very well the hazards PPCPs pose to the health of people and the environment.
That’s not at all surprising because they are part of the P2D2 (Pontiac Prescription Drug Disposal) program created by their teacher 45-year-old Paul Ritter who’s been teaching for 22 years. Ritter developed the program nine years ago after failing to come up with an answer to his wife’s question about what to do with some unwanted medication they had in their home.
The purpose of P2D2 is to provide communities with a proper method of pharmaceutical disposal that effectively reduces the misuse and abuse of pharmaceuticals as well as improves water quality.
Since 2007 Ritter can boast the program’s success not just in the United States, but in six additional countries. Millions of pounds have of medicine have been properly disposed of and laws have been enacted to prevent medications from getting into the environment and into the wrong hands through the use of P2D2.
“My students help perpetuate the national model—they established the national model,” Ritter declared at the conference.
Senior Jacob Jiles who took the class with Ritter just to get another science credit knows he got much more out of the experience than he was expecting.
“Cumulatively with the program we’ve eradicated 3 million pounds of pharmaceuticals, so that means 3 million pounds that have been taken out of the streets and or the water system,” Jiles said.
University of Illinois PhD students Pongsakorn “Tum” Suppakittpaisarn, pictured above on the right, and Fatemeh Saeidi-Rizi, pictured above on the left, study rain gardens—but not in the way you’d expect. Instead of measuring infiltration rates and pollution reduction capacity, Tum and Fatemeh want to know what happens in our brains and bodies when we see this green infrastructure practice.
A growing number of studies draw connections between access to green spaces and our physical and mental health. But, Tum said, most of that work has revolved around larger, more ubiquitous landscapes like public parks and tree-lined streets.
“We know green spaces generally are good for mental health,” he said. “But the ‘how’ and ‘why’ is still unclear, especially with rarer landscape types like rain gardens.”
So Tum and Fatemeh, along with collaborators at the University of Illinois’ Sustainability and Human Health Lab and the Health People-Health Landscape Lab at National Taiwan University, are working together to measure physical responses and changes in brain activity triggered by images of rain gardens.
The team has compiled 216 rain garden photos taken across the U.S. into nine different videos. In Illinois, Tum will use biofeedback sensors to measure what happens to participant heart rates, body temperatures, and more when they see these videos.
At the same time, Dr. Chun-Yen Chang’s team in Taiwan will use functional magnetic resonance imaging—better known as fMRI—to monitor and map changes in brain blood flow when participants are shown rain garden photos after being put through a series of tests designed to cause mental fatigue.
The researchers only began testing participants this spring, but they have a few predictions about the final results.
“It’s possible that seeing rain gardens in an urban space will help people recover from mental fatigue faster,” said Tum. “On the other hand, rain gardens with a lot of messy plants may make people feel uncomfortable, which may lead to them feeling more stress or mentally fatigue.”
Dig it and forget it—that’s one of the biggest appeals of woodchip bioreactors, one of many nitrogen-reducing practices recommended in the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy.
The bacteria living in these long, narrow trenches remove nitrogen carried through farm tile lines through a process known as denitrificaiton. The result is an average annual nitrogen reduction of 25 percent for roughly 10 years—and with minimal maintenance for the farmer.
But don’t just take our word for it. Hear what University of Illinois researchers Mark David and Laura Christianson had to say about this conservation agriculture practice this video.
What happens when a canary in the coal mine can no longer be trusted to sound the alarm? Environmental chemist Michael Lydy answers this question in the latest edition of UpClose.
Lydy and his team at Southern Illinois University Carbondale are in the early stages of a three-year study examining the prevalence of pyrethroid insecticide resistance in a crustacean used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to gauge the health of waterways. Widespread resistance in Hyalella azteca—something Lydy and others have already found in California and the Midwest—would raise doubts about the accuracy of a spectrum of state and federal biomonitoring programs.
Funded by a grant from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Illinois Water Resources Center, the study will also investigate whether a testing method known as Tenax can help scientists and natural resources managers more accurately predict the threat pyrethroids pose to aquatic life.
UpClose with is the eleventh issue of the award-winning Q&A series that gives readers an insider’s view of research on emerging contaminants. Each interview highlights a unique component of emerging contaminant research. Readers also learn about the complex, and sometimes tricky, process of conducting field studies and the potential implications of research on industries and regulations.
Join the Invasive Crayfish Collaborative for an exciting webinar featuring Purdue University master`s student Izzy Paulsen. Izzy will share her mixed method study exploring how and why teachers use live crayfish and their interest in outreach. Her study draws from interview and survey data conducted in Great Lakes states.
Deadline extended! The IISG program, in cooperation with the @nationalparkservice at @indianadunesnps and @UrbanRivers in Chicago, is offering two internship opportunities to support conservation policy efforts. Sea Grant’s national Community Engaged Internship (CEI) program aims to broaden participation in coastal, ocean, Great Lakes, and marine sciences providing training and mentorship to the next generation of scientists, decision-makers, and citizens.
The program will do so by recruiting, retaining and engaging students in place-based research, extension, education, and/or communication that respects and integrates local ways of knowing.
Meet IISG grad student scholar, Lena Azimi! Lena is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Purdue University, specializing in geomatics with a background in environmental engineering. During her master’s program, Lena encountered remote sensing technology, which provides a way to collect data from a distance, especially remote or hard-to-reach places. This experience led her to pursue a Ph.D. degree and dive deeper into remote sensing and tackle urgent environmental challenges.
Join us this Thursday for a seminar on the latest fish biology, ecology, and fisheries science happening in Lake Michigan.
Speaker will include: -Anna Hill (Purdue) with an update on alewife diet and growth rates in Lake Michigan -Charlie Roswell (INHS) with an update on Lake Michigan and Calumet River smallmouth bass movement -Dan Makauska (IL DNR) with an update from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources
