Sturgeon River Watershed Work
Could be the Start of Something Big

 

by John Gagnon

 

 

Assistant Professor David Watkins (right) with graduate student Charles Ramos, testing a flow meter in the Pilgrim River.

 

Water courses spread across the landscape like wrinkles on an old face. Brooks make streams, streams make rivers, and rivers make lakes. All of them are linked; a raindrop in the headwaters is felt in the delta. No one knows that better than Michigan Tech’s David Watkins, a water resources engineer who has been working on a trout stream in Upper Michigan. He is helping the Sturgeon and Otter River Watershed Council, a citizen group, to plan and develop a watershed management plan for the Sturgeon River. The Otter is a branch of the Sturgeon.

 

With funding from the Environmental Protection Agency, Watkins is providing four informational sessions and workshops over a six-month period. The purpose of the outreach is to encourage discourse among people. Watkins calls them “stakeholders” with wide perspectives.

 

The first session covered hydrologic processes in general and stream restoration in particular. The second session addressed soil erosion and economic issues, including instructions on how landowners can get permits, and possibly funding, to do restoration, such as stream bank stabilization, on private lands.  The next session will focus on the fishery. The last session will demonstrate the hydrologic effects of various land-use scenarios.  The key to it all, Watkins says, is the realization that land use invariably affects the water resource. "We cannot separate those two things," he says.

 

Using computer models and other information technology, Watkins simulates both the conditions in the watershed and the outcomes of various management alternatives (that is, how changes in the land use

can impact the drainage).  He also addresses how a holistic view‹rather than narrow interests‹can balance a range of watershed objectives, including recreation, aesthetics, the fishery, timber management, wildlife management, and farming.  One example of that interdependence: Certain logging practices may increase runoff; more runoff increases erosion; erosion increases sedimentation; more sediment covers the gravel stream beds that fish need to spawn.

 

The work on the Sturgeon River watershed could dovetail with other efforts to eventually improve watershed planning in the entire region.  To achieve that long-term goal, Watkins says that Michigan Tech, in conjunction with the University of Iowa and Carnegie Mellon University, has applied for funding from the National Science Foundation to form a center that would develop a model of the physical, chemical, and biological processes in the entire Great Lakes basin with an eye to sustaining the resource.