Daniel Salzler No. 1155 EnviroInsight.org
Four Items June 24, 2022
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1. Filling Water Troughs For Wildlife Seems To Be Important For The Survival Of Wildlife Here In Arizona, But Is It Healthy. Researchers find concerns for animals tied to same habitats\
January 11, 2022
University of Wyoming
Some wildlife are stuck in their ways. Like humans, wild animals often return to the same places to eat, walk on the same paths to travel and use the same places to raise their youn=
As animals become familiar with a place, site fidelity can help them know where to find good food or hiding spots from predators, and can help them move efficiently to and from these resources. However, the authors uncovered an emerging theme in the scientific literature.
The broader message of the paper suggests that, when confronted by human disturbances or climate change,
animals with strong site fidelity may not survive or reproduce as well as animals that have more flexible behaviors. When populations consist of many site-faithful individuals, this can lead to population declines.
“While these species appear to be stuck in their ways, many of them also have some unique but subtle ways of dealing with change,” says Jonathan Armstrong, an assistant professor at Oregon State University and co-author of the study.
Every once in a while, an animal does something new, and it works. While such cases are rare, those “innovators” can be key to persistence in changing landscapes.
The authors conclude with a number of suggestions for researchers and practitioners. First, long-term monitoring is key to see how individuals and populations respond to change. Second, they suggest that biologists should not expect animals to always use and find the best habitats. This is especially important for restoring new habitat areas, which may not work all that well for species with strong site fidelity because they may not “find” these restored habitats. Story Source:Materials provided by University of Wyoming.
2. Tracking The Pulse Of America’s Rivers. Scientists are monitoring hundreds of streams across the U.S., to better predict how freshwater vital signs might shift with land development and climate change
February 22,2022
Duke University
Researchers are using modern sensor technology to automatically track oxygen levels and other stream vital signs 24/7, through changing seasons, floods and droughts. In a new study, researchers analyzed at least a year’s worth of data from 222 rivers across the United States. The hope is that continuous tracking will get them closer to understanding the ‘pulse’ of streams, and how their ability to support life might change with land development and climate change.
New HopeCreek snakes its way through parts of Chapel Hill and Durham before emptying into Jordan lake, the main supply of drinking water for central North Carolina.
Bernhardt waded into the shallow stream and dipped a gas sensor into the water. She and colleagues have been monitoring fluctuations in oxygen and carbon dioxide that occur as these gases are taken up and released by algae, insects, fish and other stream organisms while they go about the business of life: photosynthesizing, growing, digesting, decomposing.
“This ‘breathing in and breathing out’ of all the organisms living in a river is sort of the pulse of a stream,” Bernhardt said. “It’s a fundamental measure of the energy going in and out of the system.”
Traditionally, such studies have relied on measurements of a small number of streams taken over a few hours or days — essentially a snapshot. The difficulty is that irregularity and upheaval are the norms for streams, said former Duke postdoc Phil Savoy.
Streamflow can change from day to day and even minute to minute with seasons and storms. Organisms living in the river must contend with flows that range from a torrent to a trickle.
Now, thanks to modern sensor technology, scientists can automatically track stream vital signs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, over the course of weeks and months. The data are uploaded to a public web portal where anyone can visualize or download it.
In a paper published Feb. 14 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bernhardt, Savoy and colleagues from nine other institutions analyzed at least a year’s worth of data from 222 rivers across the United States: winding through Arizona deserts, rushing through Puerto Rican rainforests, meandering through farmland in the Midwest.
Sensors recorded dissolved oxygen, carbon dioxide, light, and other data every five minutes day and night, through changing seasons, floods and droughts. The hope is that continuous tracking will get them closer to understanding the ‘pulse’ of streams, and how their ability to support life might change with land development and climate change.
Bernhardt rejoined the rest of her lab upstream where they were collecting mayflies and other bugs. There, she pulled up a fistful of fallen leaves and a rock covered in a green-brown goo called periphyton — a mix of algae and microbes that clings to rocks and twigs in the streambed.
“This is the base of the food web,” Bernhardt said. “A lot of bugs make a living off these.”
Periphyton captures energy from the sun and uses it to grow. Insects, snails and mussels feed on the periphyton algae, and fish hunt and consume the insects.
What happens to stream life will likely depend on how human activity changes the amount of sunlight that reaches the water, and the stability of flow, the study authors report.
At New Hope Creek, leafy sycamores, beeches and sweetgum trees shade the edges for much of the year, forming a canopy that limits the light that can reach the narrower stretches of the stream.
Climate change-caused shifts in rainfall — intense droughts or flash floods — can dry out or blast away the algae and other organisms that form the base of the food web, Bernhardt said.
On this day, the sun-dappled water gurgling over rocks and riffles made for a placid scene. “But three weeks ago it was raging,” Bernhart said.
Story Source: Materials provided by Duke University. Original written by Robin Smith. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
3. As Many Homeowners In A Know, A Small Lowering Of The Groundwater Level Can Destroy House Foundations. As early as 2000 years ago, the great Roman architect Vitruvius wrote that wooden piles must be driven down into mud or waterlogged ground and buried completely in order to create a stable foundation for buildings. A new thesis from the University of Gothenburg shows that wooden pile foundations show visible damage after only a year if the groundwater level lowers.
Many of the older buildings in Gothenburg were constructed on foundations of wooden piles. As long as the piles are completely surrounded by waterlogged, wet clay, they are very durable, because the wood breaks down very slowly in an anoxic environment. But if the mud starts to dry out, soft rot fungi can attack the piles, which eventually lose their bearing capacity, and this can lead to progressive settlement of the buildings. This is precisely the topic of a thesis by Johanna Elam at the University of Gothenburg.
“I wanted to investigate how quickly new local groundwater conditions affect the degradation of the wood in clay soil. We have been able to show that soft rot fungi only grow above the groundwater level and that bacterial degradation is less the further below the groundwater level the wood lies,” says Johanna Elam.
Soft Rot Fungi Need Oxygen
The biggest enemies of wooden piles are soft rot fungi and bacteria. Soft rot fungi can lie latent on the wood surface and in the soil, and only begin to attack the wood when they come into contact with oxygen. Degradation of the wooden pile can then take off and reduce its strength
within a relatively short period of time — in the worst case within just a few years. Degradation due to bacteria, on the other hand, takes several hundred years, despite the fact that it continues the whole time, even in anoxic environments.
Johanna Elam investigated wooden piles and measured the environmental conditions under eight buildings in Gothenburg. In addition, she simulated a range of groundwater conditions in laboratory experiments to better understand the effects of a lowered water table. These days, a certain amount of groundwater lowering is often permitted, as it is deemed to be risk-free.
Degradation visible after one year
“In lab experiments I saw that degradation is already visible on wooden piles after 12 months where the groundwater level had been lowered and the surrounding clay was no longer waterlogged. The samples taken from the piles under the buildings have all managed to escape rot, which indicates that the groundwater level and the anoxic environment have been maintained over time,” says Johanna Elam.
Today, a fall in the groundwater level of no more than 30 cm around construction sites is often a requirement. However, a 30 cm fall in the groundwater level can be enough to cause serious damage to a wooden pile if the fall occurs over a long period of time. The worst degradation of the wood occurs just above the surface of the water table, although it takes quite a long time for oxygen to penetrate down into a clay soil that has dried out. Some results also suggest that if the groundwater flows around the wooden pile, this can bring oxygen with it that causes soft rot fungi to take off.
“To protect the wood, it should be either 100 per cent wet or 100 per cent dry. I therefore recommend that excavations be properly sealed off so that the groundwater levels are maintained outside the excavated area. It’s better than pumping water in, which risks increasing the movement of water and thereby bringing in oxygen,” says Johanna Elam.
Johanna Elam’s tips for building owners:
- Take samples of existing wood foundations before a construction project starts on a neighbouring property so you can assess the extent to which the wood is already degraded and how protective the environment is.
- Consider reinforcing the foundations if there is a high risk of damage due to settlement.
- If you have a crawl cellar with earth floor, lay flooring to protect the earth from drying out rather than installing a dehumidifier or water pump. Laboratory tests showed that covering the soil surface resulted in less drying out and less degradation of the wood.
Title of the thesis: Microbial degradation of wooden foundation piles in urban context — causes and concerns
Story Source:Materials provided by University of Gothenburg
4.WRRC 2022 Annual Conference, Arizona’s Agricultural Outlook: Water, Climate, and Sustainability This year’s WRRC agricultural-themed conference will be delivered in a hybrid format, kicking off with an in-person event on July 12 that includes non-interactive live streaming, followed by two days of virtual programming. The conference will be broadly focused to reflect the state’s agricultural diversity, highlighting the various conditions, both physical and social, that shape agricultural operations throughout Arizona, including Tribal farms and ranches. The conference will consider food production across scales, from global demand to local community gardens, as well as established and emerging crop types such as cotton, wine grapes, hemp, and other industrial inputs. Confronting changes in water availability and climate, the conference will consider the future role of Arizona agriculture as a sustainable part of the state’s economy, delivering lasting benefits to both humans and the environment.
Standard registration ($60, $25 for students) closes on June 30. Registration July 1 – July 12 (including onsite registration) is $85.
Visit our Conference Website to view the agenda and for more information!
Register here for the additional conference programming on July 13-14.
Thank you to this year’s
5. Arizona Water Reuse Symposium – Join Us In Flagstaff. A block of rooms has been set side for symposium attendees through July 7th. The room rate of $159 per night will be honored thereafter for symposium attendees, but only based on availability of rooms. More information on hotel, registration and sponsorship opportunities available here (https://www.azwater.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1634953&group=).
Little America Hotel Flagstaff 2515 East Butler Avenue, Flagstaff,AZ86004. Contact Lisa Culbert at watereuseaz@cox.net or 602-332-3174
6. Used Beer Yeast Could Be The Solution To Heavy Metal Contamination In Water?
A study shows that yeast, an abundant waste product from breweries, can filter out even trace amounts of lead.
A new analysis by researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) has found that inactive yeast could be effective as an inexpensive, abundant, and simple material for removing lead contamination from drinking water supplies. The study shows that this approach can be efficient and economic, even down to part-per-billion levels of contamination. Serious damage to human health is known to occur even at these low levels.
The method is so efficient that the team has calculated that waste yeast discarded from a single brewery in Boston would enough to treat the city’s entire water supply. Such a fully sustainable system would not only purify the water but also divert what would otherwise be a waste stream needing disposal.
Lead and other heavy metals in water are a significant global problem that continues to grow because of electronic waste and discharges from mining operations. In the U.S. alone, more than 12,000 miles of waterways are impacted by acidic mine-drainage-water rich in heavy metals, the country’s leading source of water pollution. And unlike organic pollutants, most of which can be eventually broken down, heavy metals don’t biodegrade, but persist indefinitely and bioaccumulate. They are either impossible or very expensive to completely remove by
conventional methods such as chemical precipitation or membrane filtration.
Lead is highly toxic, even at tiny concentrations, especially affecting children as they grow. The European Union has reduced its standard for allowable lead in drinking water from 10 parts per billion to 5 parts per billion. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has declared that no level at all in water supplies is safe. And average levels in bodies of surface water globally are 10 times higher than they were 50 years ago, ranging from 10 parts per billion in Europe to hundreds of parts per billion in South America.
The solution studied by the MIT team is not a new one — a process called biosorption, in which inactive biological material is used to remove heavy metals from water, has been known for a few decades. But the process has been studied and characterized only at much higher concentrations, at more than one part-per-million levels. “Our study demonstrates that the process can indeed work efficiently at the much lower concentrations of typical real-world water supplies, and investigates in detail the mechanisms involved in the process,” Athanasiou says.
Because the yeast cells used in the process are inactive and desiccated, they require no particular care, unlike other processes that rely on living biomass to perform such functions which require nutrients and sunlight to keep the materials active. What’s more, yeast is abundantly available already, as a waste product from beer brewing and from various other fermentation-based industrial processes.
The same material can potentially be used to remove other heavy metals, such as cadmium and copper, but that will require further research to quantify the effective rates for those processes, the researchers say. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220613162753.htm
7. Reduce Your Air Pollution Footprint And Eat Better. Less air pollution leads to higher crop yields .
Usually, increasing agricultural productivity depends on adding something, such as fertilizer or water. A new Stanford University-led study reveals that removing one thing in particular — a common air pollutant — could lead to dramatic gains in crop yields. The analysis, published June 1 in Science Advances, uses satellite images to reveal for the first time how nitrogen oxides — gases found in car exhaust and industrial emissions — affect crop productivity. Its findings have important implications for increasing agricultural output and analyzing climate change mitigation costs and benefits around the world.
“Nitrogen oxides are invisible to humans, but new satellites have been able to map them with incredibly high precision. Since we can also measure crop production from space, this opened up the chance to rapidly improve our knowledge of how these gases affect agriculture in different regions,” said study lead author David Lobell, the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.
A NOX-ious problem
Nitrogen oxides, or NOx, are among the most widely emitted pollutants in the world. These gases can directly damage crop cells and indirectly affect them through their role as precursors to formation of ozone, an airborne toxin known to reduce crop yields, and particulate matter aerosols that can absorb and scatter sunlight away from crops.
While scientists have long had a general understanding of nitrogen oxides’ potential for damage, little is known about their actual impacts on agricultural productivity. Past research has been limited by a lack of overlap between air monitoring stations and agricultural areas, and confounding effects of different pollutants, among other challenges to ground-based analysis.
To avoid these limitations, Lobell and his colleagues combined satellite measures of crop greenness and nitrogen dioxide levels for 2018-2020. Nitrogen dioxide is the primary form of NOx and a good measure of total NOx. Although NOx is invisible to humans, nitrogen dioxide has a distinct interaction with ultraviolet light that has enabled satellite measurements of the gas at a much higher spatial and temporal resolution than for any other air pollutant.
“In addition to being more easily measured than other pollutants, nitrogen dioxide has the nice feature of being a primary pollutant, meaning it is directly emitted rather than formed in the atmosphere,” said study co-author Jennifer Burney, an associate professor of environmental science at the University of California, San Diego. “That means relating emissions to impacts is much more straightforward than for other pollutants.”
Calculating crop impacts
Based on their observations, the researchers estimated that reducing NOx emissions by about half in each region would improve yields by about 25% for winter crops and 15% for summer crops in China, nearly 10% for both winter and summer crops in Western Europe, and roughly 8% for summer crops and 6% for winter crops in India. North and South America generally had the lowest NOx exposures. Overall, the effects seemed most negative in seasons and locations where NOx likely drives ozone formation.
“The actions you would take to reduce NOx, such as vehicle electrification, overlap closely with the types of energy transformations needed to slow climate change and improve local air quality for human health,” said Burney. “The main take-home from this study is that the agricultural benefits of these actions could be really substantial, enough to help ease the challenge of feeding a growing population.”
Future analysis could incorporate other satellite observations, including photosynthetic activity
measured through solar-induced fluorescence, to better understand nitrogen dioxide’s effects on crops’ varying degrees of sensitivity to the gas throughout the growing season, according to the researchers. Similarly, more detailed examination of other pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and ammonia, as well as meteorological variables, such as drought and heat, could help to explain why nitrogen dioxide affects crops differently across different regions, years, and seasons.
“It’s really exciting how many different things can be measured from satellites now, much of it coming from new European satellites,” said study coauthor Stefania Di Tommaso, a research data analyst at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. “As the data keep improving, it really drives us to be more ambitious and creative as scientists in the types of questions we ask.”
This research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Stanford University. Original written by Rob Jordan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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