Lake Michigan is a vital artery that sustains both the ecological balance and the agricultural prosperity of the neighboring communities. Yet, with climate change, excessive groundwater extraction, and agricultural runoff polluting the lake, its future is increasingly tied to the practices of local agriculture. Our research addresses this challenge by leveraging advanced UAV-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology for precise soil moisture estimation. By optimizing irrigation practices through accurate soil moisture data, we aim to significantly reduce groundwater extraction and minimize agricultural runoff, thereby contributing to the preservation of Lake Michigan’s ecological balance. This project represents a critical step towards sustainable water management that underscores the profound connection between agricultural practices and the health of Lake Michigan. This research is aligned with the IISG strategic plan in promoting resilience and sustainability in the community by safeguarding our natural heritage and ensuring the prosperity of future generations.

Bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) blood serum will be tested for PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Each sample will be analyzed three times, once for ionic PFAS, once for neutral PFAS, and once for oxidizable precursors. These analyses will achieve the research goals of determining:

1. What concentration of ionic and neutral PFAS are in bald eagle samples?
2. How do oxidizable precursors affect the concentration of ionic PFAS in the samples?
3. What does the “big picture” indicate about the health of the bald eagles and the surrounding ecosystem?
4. What does this “big picture” suggest about environmental and human health?

This will give previously unavailable insights into the amount of PFAS and PFAS precursors in bald eagles and their surrounding aquatic ecosystems. These concentrations, which will give us an estimate of the PFAS contamination in bald eagles, will be compared with known thresholds of toxicological effects for the bald eagles, which in turn will give us an indirect assessment of the surrounding environment.

My research plan has two main components: (1) Successfully 3D print a single flexible, oleophilic hair structure on a flat surface, using widely available and low-cost manufacturing methods to demonstrate capture performance. (2) Utilize the aforementioned design to scale-up and create a filter with multiple hairs to test printability and capture performance.

Microplastics are commonly found in water ways and are challenging to remove due to the wide range of particle size, shape, and chemical composition. A 2013 study reported that the surface of the Great Lakes accumulate an average of 43,000 microplastics particles per square kilometer and up to 466,000 microplastics per kilometer near major cities. A decade later, nearly 90% of samples taken from the surface of the Great Lakes exceeded safe levels for wildlife and people. This poses serious risk to public and environmental health since 21% of the world’s surface freshwater is contained in the Great Lakes (about 22.7 quadrillion liters). Nearly 40 million people depend on the Great Lakes for drinking water. However, because these particles are small and prevalent, often they make their way past water treatment facilities and contaminate drinking water. Current practices for particle removal include bubble, granular, and membrane filtration; however, these have various disadvantages like particle abundance and size dependency or requiring specific environmental conditions, of these the most common issues are clogging and limited-service life. Hence, the need for an environmentally friendly, low-cost, and scalable mechanism for microplastic capture is evident.

The objective of this work is to characterize microbial metabolism across a gradient of impacted sites in southwest Lake Michigan, spanning NE Illinois to NW Indiana.

While microbes tend to alter their environments as ecosystem engineers, their existence is a function of their environment. Any organism has a range of conditions it can tolerate; aquatic microbes and their metabolisms are generally dependent on temperature, pH, light, and resource availability. Humans also tend to significantly alter our environment, and we have shown the ability to cause change much faster than microbes. Our increase of the planet’s temperature through greenhouse gas emissions will increase water temperatures and further reduce ice cover over the coming decades. On a finer scale, industrial practices emit pollutants into the coastal air, soil, sediments, and waters. The effects of these actions, prevalent in southwest Lake Michigan,
are poorly understood and disproportionately felt by low-income and minority communities.

This research addresses two main questions related to the attitudes and behaviors toward invasive crayfish in the Great Lakes Region to better understand the outreach needs of these communities.

• What are the attitudes and behaviors of teachers in the Great Lakes Region towards invasive species of crayfish? What are effective methods of outreach for this community?
• What are the attitudes and behaviors of individuals involved in the culinary market in the Great Lakes Region towards invasive species of crayfish? What are effective methods of outreach for this community?

Invasive crayfish in the Great Lakes Region pose a threat to local ecosystems as they often outcompete native species and have the potential to damage local freshwater ecosystems. Native crayfish are important consumers and predators within the food web, and the disruption that invasive crayfish cause can have wide-reaching ecological and economic effects. There has been research and outreach done about the spread of invasive crayfish by use as bait by anglers, in aquariums and the pet trade, and through aquaculture. My research explores two additional potential introduction pathways: teachers who use crayfish in the classroom and people in the culinary market who use them as live food products. Both groups have been cited as potential pathways for crayfish introduction and spread. However, there is little understanding of the ways that individuals within these groups feel about and interact with invasive species in general and crayfish specifically.

Three major research questions that we aim to address are:

• Are the secondary environmental impacts of the existing nutrient loss management BMPs significant so that they pose substantial challenges in their sustainability?
• How could redesign the existing technologies/practices to minimize these challenges?
• How can we offer techno economically viable solutions to boost the technology adoption of the existing nutrient loss management strategies in the larger scale?

Lake Michigan, a significant global freshwater resource, has been constantly afflicted by nutrient pollution leading to eutrophication due to draining of excess nutrients from the most intensively managed agricultural landscapes in the Midwest. Many BMPs have been in practice in the urban and agricultural watersheds and are effective in reducing nutrient loss via surface runoff, yet lake Michigan’s nutrient concentrations and HABs are still serious problems. Recent research suggests that the existing BMPs render secondary environmental impacts which could undermine their functions of nutrient loss reduction and challenge their sustainability. For example, multiple BMPs that have been tremendously effective in controlling surface runoff and the subsequent associated nutrient loss, have dramatically altered the nutrient loss pathways from surface to sub-surface drainage whose subsequent negative impacts are profound on the Great Lakes region. Agricultural and stormwater BMPs such as conservation tillage, strip tillage, riparian buffers, bioretention cells, woodchip mulching etc. have been particularly effective in sediment and nutrient loss reduction from surface runoff in field scale, while inadequate to override nutrient export from the subsurface drainage when observed in the watershed scale. In that regard, researchers have identified woodchip based BMPs as important green infrastructures to overcome these challenges and keep pace with the rising ecological impacts of urbanization and agricultural practices.