Milwaukee residents who have spent most of their lives near the sprawling Lincoln Park have stories to tell about how degraded the park had become. The Milwaukee River was hidden behind buckthorn and other brush and the fish that lived in the tainted water were too contaminated to eat.

Last week they shared some of these memories as part of a joyous celebration that the park and river have been cleaned up. State Representative Mandela Barnes described the park now as “good for people’s health.” At this event, a ceremonial ribbon was cut and the park was officially reborn.

Lincoln Park is in the Milwaukee Estuary Area of Concern, designated by the International Joint Commission. Contamination in the park came from historic industrial and municipal discharges among other sources.

The cleanup of Lincoln Park got its biggest boost from the Great Lakes Legacy Act, which provided federal matching funds from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to share the project’s cost with Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and Milwaukee County Parks. Agency representatives, as well as local officials and residents, were on site to celebrate this success story.

Over a four year period, 171,000 cubic yards of sediment laced with an alphabet soup of contaminants—PCBs, PAHs, and NAPLs—were removed from targeted zones in the river and 12.5 acres of shoreline were restored. Commenting the time and work that went into this remediation and restoration, Cameron Davis, EPA senior advisor to the administrator, described the project partners as more persistent than the contaminants themselves.

Throughout the process, Caitie Nigrelli, IISG environmental social scientist was on the ground, keeping the community informed, but also facilitating residents to take some ownership of the park. Nigrelli helped a volunteer organization get started—Friends of Lincoln Park—and joined in the group’s one year anniversary last fall.

Anne Stadler Vaillancourt, a leader of the Friends group, spoke at last week’s event and a number of members were there to set up, take down, and enjoy the festivities. The organization is enjoying success and is ready to grow in membership. They recently held a volunteer cleanup day at the park and more than 100 people showed up. They have two upcoming Weed Out events to remove invasive species on May 14 and May 28.

Stadler Vaillancourt expressed to the morning’s participants that the Friends of Lincoln Park are committed to take care of the park for the long term.

Also in attendance were: Kevin Haley, landscape architect and John Dargle, Jr., director, both of Milwaukee County Parks; State Sen. Lena Taylor; State Rep. David Brown; Theo Lipscomb, chairman of Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors; and Ed Eberle, assistant deputy secretary of Wisconsin DNR.

This year, the National College Sea Grant Program is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary, and during the month of April we, along with the 32 other programs, are reaching out to our former (and current) Knauss Fellows to find out how their experience has shaped their career and impacted their lives.

So what better way to start then by chatting with our first-ever fellow, Molecular Ecologist and Fish Conservation Geneticist (and University of Illinois alumnus!) John Epifanio.

What do you remember most about your fellowship time?

While the fellowship really helped me in my career by affording me a more realistic view of how policy is developed, there are a few less formal aspects of my fellowship year that remain most memorable.  First, I was genuinely fortunate to work for U.S. Senator John H. Glenn on Great Lakes issues.  To work for an American hero in itself is pretty neat.  He was in every way, the “real deal.” More importantly, the experience taught me a great deal about how public stature and personal capital can be used on behalf of a pretty worthy cause—in this case, the Great Lakes ecosystem.  Second, I met my future spouse through the Knauss Fellowship program (she and I were both part of the class of ’90).  I like to think that in this regard, the fellowship keeps on paying dividends. Last, I developed a handful of long-standing friendships that have endured the years and distance.

What was the most useful skill or knowledge that you got from the experience?

I think the most useful skill I received from the fellowship was to focus the way I write and communicate complex issues.  As scientists we are often trained to exhaustively cover a topic an inch wide and mile deep.  In working with policy, this level of coverage is a luxury that demands distilling an entire body of literature into a single bullet point on a memo (Oh, and by the way, the boss wants it yesterday!).

How has it played a role in your career or your life?

In many ways, the fellowship is a bit of an exclusive club.  I mean this not in a snooty way that results from some greater virtue or qualification on my part, but rather in a way that having been part of the fellowship program carries a bit of cache.  When I meet others who have been in the program, there is an immediate bond and acknowledgement that we were really part of something special—a unique opportunity and sideline pass for the total “D.C. experience.”

Think about “weather” as the clothes you are wearing on any given day. “Climate,” on the other hand, is all the clothes in your closet.

Molly Woloszyn’s metaphor helps visitors at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum understand how today’s weather does not really tell us what is happening in terms of climate and climate change. It’s the first of many lessons and activities in the exhibit Weather to Climate: Our Changing World, which opened on Saturday.

The exhibit provides many hands-on ways to understand weather, climate, and climate change. For example, using a weather simulator, you can mix ingredients like wind, humidity, cloud cover and more to whip up a thunder storm or a tornado—or a sunny day, if you are so inclined. And visitors can stand in front of the green screen and try their hand at being an on-air meteorologist.

With the spin of a wheel, visitors can learn the impact of various climate scenarios on a variety of plants and animals, and they can create crazy new animals to cope with what may lie ahead. The exhibit journey wraps up with an opportunity to learn steps we can take to reduce our carbon footprint.

Woloszyn, IISG climate Extension specialist, who provided ideas and expertise to the exhibit development process, was on hand last week, along with Peggy Notebaert’s Steve Sullivan (pictured above) and Marc Miller to meet with reporters and introduce the exhibit.

“The exhibit gives children and their caretakers a fun and interactive way to learn about weather, climate, and climate change–complex topics that are hopefully made easier to understand,” said Woloszyn (pictured below being interviewed).  “The goal was to not only communicate the science and impacts on nature and humans, but to leave people with action they can take that can help our world by reducing their own carbon footprint.”

Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant is now a NOAA Weather-Ready Nation Ambassador as part of a national effort to improve the readiness, responsiveness, and overall resilience regarding extreme weather, water, and climate events.

The Weather-Ready Nation (WRN) initiative was formed in 2011 in response to deadly tornadoes that struck Joplin, Missouri and Birmingham, Alabama. At that point, the National Weather Service realized the need to better understand how to motivate people to respond to warnings.

The goal of WRN is to save lives and livelihoods by providing better information for better decisions. NOAA is directing research to focus on improving scientific understanding of severe weather, developing new technologies, improving models, as well as addressing sociological challenges that may improve the likelihood people will take prompt action to save lives when they receive a warning.

One groundbreaking WRN technological development is Wireless Emergency Alerts. Since 2012, these weather warnings go directly to WEA-capable cellphones—no sign up required. These alerts saved lives during the November 2013 tornado outbreak in Illinois.

The WRN plan involves the collective effort of the whole community, including other government agencies and emergency management, academia, the media, the insurance industry, non-profits, and the private sector. That’s where ambassadors come in.

Ambassadors are charged with being agents for change and leadership in a community—promoting WRN messages, engaging NOAA in potential collaborations, sharing success stories, and serving as an example by initiating workplace preparedness.

“Weather Ready Nation is a very important initiative for our country and I am happy that Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant is now a recognized ambassador,” said Molly Woloszyn, IISG Extension climate specialist. “A lot of the work that we do directly relates to the goals of the initiative, so this is a good opportunity to recognize that and to continue to explore how we can incorporate WRN and the National Weather Service into our efforts.”

Through Resilient Chicago, Woloszyn provides information for decision makers in the region to incorporate climate adaptation in local planning efforts. She is also leading a study to help critical facilities in Chicago, like hospitals, to assess their vulnerability to flooding and to adopt changes that reduce the risks.

An IISG-funded researcher found that the mixture of pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) present in Lake Michigan can have significant negative effects on fathead minnow embryos.

Maria Sepúlveda, a Purdue University ecotoxicologist, is telling the next chapter on research of PPCPs in Lake Michigan. In 2011, Ball State researchers, also funded by IISG, examined the concentration and detection of pharmaceuticals in the nearshore waters in Lake Michigan.Sepúlveda chose to study two of the chemicals found in that study: triclocarban, a compound found in antibacterial soaps, lotions, and toothpaste, and cotinine, a metabolite of nicotine. Both of these chemicals find their way into Lake Michigan through sewage wastewater treatment effluent.

The researchers created realistic field concentrations in the laboratory, examining effects of the chemicals both individually and in a mixture. They also examined acute and chronic toxicity of field-observed levels of chemicals on four organisms from different parts of the food chain: green algae, diatoms, zooplankton (water flea, Daphnia magna), and fathead minnow embryos.

Medicines in Lake Michigan impact minnow embryos Sepúlveda found that when she tested the four organisms with individual compounds at levels similar to those found in Lake Michigan, they remained largely resistant with the exception of the fathead minnow embryo, which was slightly affected by the triclocarban. When she exposed the organisms at the bottom of the food chain— diatoms, zooplankton, and Daphnia magna—to the mixtures, they were not affected even at high levels. Yet the hours-old fathead minnow embryo proved to be significantly susceptible to the contaminants.

“This is not surprising since embryos are known to be more sensitive to most contaminants compared to adults,” said Sepulvida. “The fish embryos were more sensitive than anything else we tested. “We chose this species because there was no data in the literature and therefore our values are novel,” she added.

Research on PPCPs in Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes overall is limited, so she cautions that these results are very preliminary. “It would be ideal if we had more data from not just Lake Michigan, but from the Great Lakes in general. But there’s just not a lot of data on pharmaceuticals from the Great Lakes right now,” Sepúlveda said.

“There are over 200 pharmaceuticals that people look for all the time in surface water. It’s overwhelming when you start thinking about it. It’s very complicated to study in a lab or in the field.”

This story appears in the latest edition of The Helm. 

This has been a good year for Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant. Working with our many partners, big projects reached their culmination, in some cases providing researchers and decision makers new ways to access data. And the spotlight was turned on Lake Michigan for research and education. Here are10 important stories from 2015.