After holding Covid at bay for 2.5 years, it finally caught up with me this fall after I had to travel. My daughter got it as well. Luckily, neither of us felt ill, so I gained a 7-year-old field assistant for a day of water sampling. I spent many days alone in the field this year, so it was nice to have company. It was also a relief to simultaneously get my daughter outside all day and get some work done. Luckily, we have child size waders, so she was ready to get in the streams. A great part of being a graduate student is constantly learning new things and approaching your research questions in different ways. Sometimes, though, that results in taking on projects that are well outside of your knowledge base. That is how I ended up taking water samples with Covid and a second grader for a project that is primarily hydrology focused. I am still working in restored wetlands on former cranberry farms (bogs) but with the goal of understanding how much nitrogen is in rivers when they enter the restored wetlands and how much nitrogen is in the rivers when they leave the restored wetlands, also known as a mass-balance or nutrient budget. Natural resources managers are interested in this question, because the estuaries in southeast Massachusetts, where most cranberry bogs are located, are being polluted with excess nitrogen, which causes many adverse outcomes, such as the death of marine organisms. We are interested in whether restoring former cranberry farms into wetlands can help ameliorate the amount of nitrogen that is reaching the estuaries. Figuring out how much nitrogen the restored wetlands are preventing from flowing downstream on an annual basis requires several pieces of information. We need to know how much water is flowing into and out of the sections of restored stream (called “reaches”) all year long. We also need to know how much groundwater is coming into the stream and how much nitrogen is in the groundwater and stream water. Finally, we must figure out how much of the water in the stream is coming from groundwater and how much comes from precipitation. Understanding stream flow requires periodic measurements of the stream coupled with data from continuously recording instruments that we have in the stream, but the other information requires taking water samples throughout the year. I bring the water samples back to the lab to measure nitrogen concentrations and some other components that help us answer our questions. This project is very much a work in progress, and a bunch of things have not gone as planned. It was harder than expected to find the groundwater to sample. A drought meant that there was almost no precipitation for months, and the stream flows were very low. I’m learning a lot about water, how it moves around, and how to measure it, though. While there is still a lot of data to collect, I think the final product will be useful to managers and will help refine restoration goals and practices.
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