Evaluating Water Quality Data of Nebraska Lakes for Eutrophication and Treatment

PJ Hildebrand Author

08/03/2020 Added

17 Plays

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This study focuses on the analysis of water quality data of three Nebraska lakes. The study determines appropriate places to install floating treatment wetlands for maximum effectiveness.

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[00:00:00.540]Hello, everyone.
[00:00:01.490]My name is P.J. Hildebrand.
[00:00:03.040]I will be going into my sophomore year as
[00:00:05.000]a biological systems engineering major
[00:00:07.470]at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
[00:00:10.750]I had a great summer.
[00:00:12.240]I learned a lot from this summer research experience.
[00:00:15.520]And I'm really grateful it worked out the way it did.
[00:00:18.531]I'm hoping that I can apply a lot of the information
[00:00:21.737]from the programs and the data that we used,
[00:00:27.100]hoping to be able to apply everything from that
[00:00:29.300]into some future classes and internships, hopefully.
[00:00:34.104]I think there were definitely some difficult challenges,
[00:00:36.750]such as communication, this summer.
[00:00:40.460]Struggled a little bit with that.
[00:00:42.470]It was difficult to make sure everybody was on the same page
[00:00:46.030]but overall I'm really proud of the work
[00:00:47.730]that my team and I completed.
[00:00:49.490]I think we had some great findings for our graduate students
[00:00:52.470]in our department, to kind of take over and continue
[00:00:56.600]with their projects.
[00:00:59.040]And so before diving into my research,
[00:01:01.770]I'd like to thank the College of Engineering's dean's office
[00:01:04.620]and the engineering graduate programs
[00:01:06.520]at the University of Nebraska Lincoln
[00:01:08.410]for supporting my work this summer,
[00:01:10.530]through the Summer Nebraska Engineering Research Program.
[00:01:15.240]So, my project this summer was evaluating water quality
[00:01:18.670]data of Nebraska lakes for eutrophication and treatment.
[00:01:22.480]So a little bit of background.
[00:01:23.550]If you don't know what eutrophication is,
[00:01:25.650]it's basically when there is an excess amount
[00:01:27.580]of nutrients in a water body,
[00:01:30.270]and then those excess nutrients can cause algal blooms,
[00:01:34.830]that can sometimes be harmful, to grow,
[00:01:38.210]and cause kind of major economic losses.
[00:01:42.140]Things like fish kills, and it can decrease the value
[00:01:46.800]of property; it's very aesthetically unpleasing
[00:01:50.170]to have a lot of algae grow on top.
[00:01:53.199]So these harmful algal blooms and things like E. coli
[00:01:57.983]basically just impair the water quality
[00:02:00.880]and can cause a lot of problems in society.
[00:02:04.430]So, one cost-effective option for treating these things
[00:02:07.440]are floating treatment wetlands.
[00:02:09.460]And that's what this kind of, this research
[00:02:12.030]is the basis of, is trying to figure out:
[00:02:15.440]where can we put floating treatment wetlands
[00:02:17.650]that would be most effective and most helpful?
[00:02:21.460]So basically the objective was to analyze this data.
[00:02:25.960]We got the data from the Nebraska Department
[00:02:27.770]of Environment and Energy.
[00:02:30.540]And my three lakes were Holmes Lake,
[00:02:32.070]Bluestem Lake, and the Calamus Reservoir, all in Nebraska.
[00:02:35.680]And so then secondly was to determine the appropriate
[00:02:39.000]places to install floating treatment wetlands, like I said,
[00:02:41.670]where they could be most effective.
[00:02:43.720]I hypothesized that these would be most useful
[00:02:47.150]in higher developed areas with storm water retention systems
[00:02:50.350]that might have a lot of runoff
[00:02:52.899]from industrial developments.
[00:02:57.050]Or agricultural areas from fertilizer runoff.
[00:03:01.290]So, what we did for this project, we started off
[00:03:04.300]just taking raw data from Nebraska Department
[00:03:06.810]of Environment and energy,
[00:03:08.860]and looked at around 25 different water quality parameters.
[00:03:14.310]And we kind of analyzed this data,
[00:03:16.500]we made a bunch of different scatterplots,
[00:03:19.170]and for things like E. coli levels, microsystem levels,
[00:03:24.290]turbidity, temperature, nitrogen,
[00:03:27.390]those are just some of the parameters that we looked at.
[00:03:30.650]And we also gathered weather data
[00:03:32.340]from the Automated Weather Data Network.
[00:03:35.530]There are 68 active weather stations around the state
[00:03:38.460]of Nebraska; we pretty much just picked the ones
[00:03:41.210]that were closest to our lakes that we were studying.
[00:03:44.760]And we found weather data for every day that we had
[00:03:49.030]water quality parameter data for,
[00:03:51.410]and we also made scatterplots and graphs out of those,
[00:03:54.180]and then kind of compared it
[00:03:55.320]to our water quality parameters,
[00:03:57.790]and tried to find some correlations between the two.
[00:04:02.534]So, we also used ARC GIS and created delineated watersheds
[00:04:09.251]to see what kind of areas water flows from into our lakes
[00:04:14.640]that could possibly cause this eutrophication.
[00:04:17.720]So an example of that is this picture on the bottom-left.
[00:04:21.133]It kind of shows the watershed,
[00:04:23.580]that big black spot on the map,
[00:04:26.020]shows where the water flows from into Holmes Lake,
[00:04:29.480]on the left side of the picture,
[00:04:31.270]and then we also used ARC GIS to determine land use data,
[00:04:34.700]which is the picture directly to the right of that.
[00:04:37.830]And that just kind of shows how the land is used.
[00:04:40.890]So those red area is where the highly developed places
[00:04:44.220]like restaurants and stores,
[00:04:47.200]and then outside of that is more of kind
[00:04:50.920]of housing developments, right there.
[00:04:54.930]But places like directly south of Holmes Lake,
[00:04:59.020]that's a golf course, so it's a very underdeveloped place,
[00:05:02.800]but pretty much the darker the color gets,
[00:05:04.990]the more developed it's gonna be.
[00:05:08.200]So then on the upper-right, you can see a graph
[00:05:12.350]that I made, so this is Bluestem Lake E. coli levels.
[00:05:15.590]And it just kind of shows the variation in time,
[00:05:17.640]and I included this graph because Bluestem Lake
[00:05:19.830]actually had the highest E. coli levels out
[00:05:21.870]of all three lakes that I studied.
[00:05:24.620]So I just thought it was kind of an interesting graph
[00:05:26.480]to be able to show those levels.
[00:05:30.570]And in the results and conclusions section,
[00:05:32.980]so I decided that precipitation was the biggest
[00:05:35.630]weather factor that correlated to higher levels of nutrients
[00:05:39.000]and harmful algal bloom contamination.
[00:05:41.920]And you could kind of see this correlate pretty well.
[00:05:46.348]It looked like after every big rain we had,
[00:05:49.500]there would be spikes in nutrient levels in the lakes.
[00:05:53.460]And I think that was mainly due to the runoff
[00:05:56.120]from agricultural lands.
[00:05:59.680]And Bluestem Lake had the highest E. coli contamination
[00:06:02.540]of the three lakes studied.
[00:06:04.440]I think this was definitely because Bluestem Lake
[00:06:07.430]was mainly surrounded by agricultural land and farmland,
[00:06:11.270]and so there could be a lot of fertilizer runoff,
[00:06:14.350]and things like that that could cause E. Coli to grow
[00:06:17.090]pretty easily, due to the excess nutrients
[00:06:20.990]that it can feed off of.
[00:06:22.880]And so, basically, the next one is right in line with that.
[00:06:26.500]Lakes in agricultural areas have higher nutrient levels,
[00:06:29.804]and demonstrate a higher possibility of eutrophication.
[00:06:32.900]So, ultimately, my hypothesis was correct.
[00:06:36.920]Agricultural areas are probably gonna need
[00:06:39.150]more floating treatment wetlands to help treat
[00:06:42.700]those water bodies that are contaminated.
[00:06:45.570]And furthermore, floating treatment wetlands
[00:06:48.490]would be a great investment for Bluestem Lake.
[00:06:50.740]Like I said, it's surrounded by a lot of agricultural lands
[00:06:53.450]that can have runoff that can cause problems
[00:06:56.950]in the long run, for sure.
[00:06:59.940]So with that, that kind of concludes
[00:07:02.290]my research for the summer.
[00:07:03.970]Like I said, I really enjoyed it; I learned a lot.
[00:07:06.460]And I'm really hoping that this is a lot of information
[00:07:11.100]that our graduate students can take further,
[00:07:13.680]and turn into an even bigger project.
[00:07:15.840]So thank you for listening.

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Evaluating Water Quality Data of Nebraska Lakes for Eutrophication and Treatment

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