An Ode to Menomin

Oh wondrous puddle of emerald hue
With thy phosphorus-tinctured waters.
The summer's day holds folks at bay
With a symphony of odors. 

Each season brings a cornucopia
A fetid, liquid plasma
Of vig'rous cyanobacteria
and accompanied miasma. 

Thy verdant shores drive away hordes
of visitors with playthings.
Olfactory hurdles and waves a-curdled
Diminish their sunbathing. 

What mysteries lie beneath your waves
Wrapped in an undulating viridian strand?
Can we comprehend your lacustrine ken
While perched upon the land? 

Measure and sample carefully
To frame thy nutrient cycles properly;
A claim of knowing might sound indulgent,
But eliminating the causes would make us effulgent. 

Oh wondrous puddle of emerald hue
Oh raucous, glaucus algae.
The summer's days we've worked away
To tease apart your quandary.

Keeping track of all your data

It's week seven already! That means our students are collecting their last samples and surveys for a poster session at The Raw Deal in Menomonie this next tuesday. Looking back, between my group and Steve's we went through nearly a 500-count bag of 125 mL plastic Nalgene bottles.

Several hundred bottles, waiting to be acid-washed and put back into service.

Most of these bottles had water samples to test for phosphorus and chlorophyll-a. A single day out in the field might produce 25 or more samples, each of which needs to be run through a series of steps before we can actually measure what we're looking for.

Blake with 53 samples lined up, awaiting phosphorus analysis.

And then there is the data logging equipment - either sondes that you drop over the side of a boat and it records a whole bunch of parameters as you lower it to the bottom, or the pressure/temperature sensors that we've installed in several streams to record changes in stream depth and water temperature. You can record data every few minutes or even every few seconds.

All of this ends up as data. Spreadsheets full of numbers. Numbers from different sensors, numbers from different days, numbers from different sites. It can get confusing. So one of the things we try to stress to the students is the importance of maintaining organized notes, labeling sample containers before you collect the material, even using a shorthand to keep locations and instruments organized.

For this project we have about 15 temperature and pressure loggers in streams around the area. Each of these loggers comes with a serial number, but that's just another number. To keep track of the data loggers, I decided to name them. With 15 data loggers, that gives us 13 dwarfs, a wizard, and a hobbit.

And in a little bit of art-imitating-life, Kili ended up having a bad pressure sensor and was left behind...

Learning to find your own bugs

Last week my wife and I traveled to Rocky Mountain National Park. One of my favorite features of the rockies (besides the in-your-face geology) is a particular bird called the American Dipper, which is known for walking along stream bottoms searching for insects and its eponymous up-and-down bobbing.

The American Dipper (Cinclus mexicanus)

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What is "tilling?"

Week 1 Blog Topic

Each week we will be asking our students to write to a specific topic. The topic for Week 1 is "Getting started and settling in."

We've invited 10 students from across the US: big cities and small towns - Menomonie, Wisconsin is similar to other places, but very different than others. What did they expect? Was the actual place different than what they thought? We'll be asking the students to share their thoughts using this guiding question:

"Does the civic and work environment meet your expectations? Why or why not?"

Let the games begin!

The REU students have arrived and we enjoyed an epic game of Kubb along with a getting-to-know-you BBQ. Monday we hand out laptops, get paperwork finalized, and an orientation to the town and research.

Welcome to the Blog Home of the LAKES REU

Hello world!
This is the official blog-home of the LAKES REU project. This research experience for undergraduates (REU) program will be studying issues related to phosphorus pollution in the Red Cedar watershed of west-central Wisconsin. Over the summer, you will be able to read about student experiences, some background information about the study area, and get to learn about some of the general challenges that face many lakes in Wisconsin and around the world.