Guest Post: University of Illinois Learning in Community Teams up with Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant to Prevent Pollution

For University of Illinois students, getting a break from the ordinary, lecture-based class is as easy as enrolling in ENG 315: Learning in Community (LINC). The multi-section course offers a chance to team up with local nonprofits to design, plan, and implement new community-based projects. And this fall, students can spend the semester working with Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant to reduce pharmaceutical and personal care product (PPCP) pollution in Champaign-Urbana.

The IISG course will introduce students to the threats PPCPs pose to aquatic habitats and simple steps individuals can take to reduce those risks. Tours of local water quality labs will also provide a behind-the-scenes look at ongoing PPCP research. But the majority of the semester will be dedicated to designing and executing projects that help spread the word about proper disposal of unwanted medicines.

“This is a unique opportunity for students to apply what they are learning to help solve problems in sustainable ways,” said Terri Hallesy, IISG education coordinator. “They will gain real-world experiences while helping to boost awareness of a critical environmental issue and protect the health of our aquatic ecosystems.” 

Specific projects are still to be determined, and the class will have a lot of freedom to design outreach efforts that appeal to them. Previous classes mentored local high school students, wrote an article for a campus-based environmental magazine, and created outreach materials to be used at the McKinley Heath Center and at campus events. Other options include modifying K-12 curricula, designing social media campaigns, and even building a mobile app.  

Students will also be in charge of planning and orchestrating a single-day medicine takeback event at the end of the semester. The class will work throughout the semester to design a promotional plan and coordinate with campus housing and other organizations on campus.  

Its community focus and interdisciplinary approach make this course a perfect fit for a wide range of majors—from marketing to education to environmental sciences. Students will leave with new skills and experiences that move them closer to their career goals.  

LINC courses are offered through the College of Engineering and are open to all University of Illinois students. For fall 2014, students can choose between sections that address issues like water conservation, after-school safety, and homelessness. The IISG course will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:30-4:50 p.m. 

Contact Terri Hallesy for questions about the IISG course. To learn more about PPCP pollution and proper disposal, visit www.unwantedmeds.org.

Illinois Water 2014 Call for Sessions

As the snow melts and it seems like spring may someday arrive, it’s also time to start planning for our biennial Water Conference. Illinois Water 2014 is scheduled for this October 14 and 15 at the University of Illinois’s Illini Union. We have exciting plans for plenaries, student poster sessions, and a water careers panel, but we need your help to create an engaging and timely lineup of sessions and speakers. If you have a research project or concept you’ve been developing and you’d like an opportunity to present and discuss it with your peers, we invite you to submit a session proposal. We’ll be accepting proposals until March 28. Please see the Water 2014 website for more information on how to submit a session proposal or for help in developing your ideas.

Photo by Anjanette Riley

Bringing Water Science to the People of Illinois

We’ve been neglecting the blog lately, which would be sad in and of itself, if it didn’t also mean that we have been out of the office doing vast amounts of outreach. What kinds of outreach, you say? We’re so glad you asked.

You may have noticed our many postings about the Drought Workshop at the Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System. What you may not have noticed is that this workshop was developed because of outreach requirements on a research grant.  Last spring, Dr. Ximing Cai approached us with the idea of a drought workshop, because he was concerned that his research on forecasting and climate wasn’t reaching the people who needed it most, namely, farmers and water resources managers. Since the mission of the Illinois Water Resources Center is to bring watershed science to the people of Illinois, we were excited to help Dr. Cai reach a broader audience.  And we’re happy to report that we did host a broad audience. Members of Illinois’ agriculture, economics, and natural resources departments joined with researchers for the University of Illinois and the Prairie Research Institute to discuss what information they needed to help them do their jobs during droughts. Over 30 people attended the workshop, and this was during a partial federal government shutdown that kept three of our speakers at home. While we missed their input, it was encouraging to see how many people are interested in managing drought more effectively in Illinois. Stay tuned for a report and white paper on this topic to be published on our website.

The other task that’s been keeping us so busy (including talking about it in our sleep, by one report) is nutrient pollution. Illinois is home to an impressive agriculture scene and a lot of people, most of whom live in the Chicago area. These two factors mean that Illinois puts a lot of nitrogen and phosphorous into our waterways in the form of escaped fertilizer and treated wastewater. These nutrients eventually make their way down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they greatly contribute to the massive hypoxia, or dead, zones that have been appearing there for over 30 years. The State of Illinois is now working on reducing this form of pollution by developing a nutrient reduction strategy with the aid of a group of stakeholders. Led by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the Illinois Department of Agriculture, the stakeholder group includes representative from wastewater treatment professionals, the agricultural community, and environmental groups, and has become large. Which is where we come in. Big groups require a lot of organization to make them run efficiently and still let everyone’s ideas and opinions be heard. Consequently, IWRC is facilitating the working group meetings to ensure that Illinois drafts a workable strategy to meaningfully reduce nutrient pollution in a way that addresses everyone’s concerns and includes the expertise of all the group members. As you can imagine, curating the content generated by nearly 50 people has taken a lot of work, but it promises to be a rewarding experience, and we hope to see the finished project next summer. For more information on the Nutrient Reduction Strategy, you can visit the IEPA website.

To round out our outreach efforts, we’ve also started preparing for Illinois Water 2014! If you have ideas of activities, sections, and events you’d like to see included, please contact us.    

Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System

The Biennial Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System is occurring this October 1-3, 2013 in Peoria, IL at Four Points by Sheraton. The planners have sent us these exciting details to help us entice you to join us there:

On October 1, Lt. Governor Sheila Simon will host the Illinois River Coordinating Council meeting which includes an open forum for public questions and comments.  Members of the Mississippi and Wabash-Ohio River Coordinating Councils will also be in attendance. Through a public dialogue, the Councils coordinate initiatives, projects, and funding to promote the ecological health of Illinois’ rivers.

Featured keynote conference speakers include Michael Reuter, The Nature Conservancy; James Baumgartner, Caterpillar, Inc.; Mike Doherty, Illinois Farm Bureau; Wendell Shauman, Shauman Farm; Dave Wethington, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and Ryan Burchett, Mississippi River Distilling Company. Speakers will touch on various topics addressing industry and conservation, Illinois in the global economy, the Great lakes & Mississippi River Interbasin Study, and working locally with river resources.

Concurrent sessions will address infrastructure needs and beneficial uses of sediment, local community and agricultural actions to protect river resources, watershed history, wildlife habitat, river science and more, offering perspectives on regional, national, and global impacts of the River system. These sessions are designed to present advancements in agricultural and environmental technologies; improve understanding of economic and societal benefits of healthy ecosystems; and recognize activities across Illinois through local community actions to restore the health of this globally important watershed.

To top things off, the Illinois Water Resources Center will not only be staffing an exhibit so you can stop by and talk water (perhaps collect our autographs), but we are also hosting a workshop to discuss the 2012 Drought. We’ll delve into the workshop more in weeks to come, but in the meantime, if you would like to learn more about the conference, or register, you can check out the event website here. Registration prices go up September 12, so make your plans soon. And remember, the conference is open to everyone and has plans for all interest levels, including conservation tours and a guided bus trip. 
 

What is a Water Center?

So what is a water center, anyway?

IWRC is part of the National Institute of Water Resources, which is made of 54 water centers in all 50 states and US territories. Water centers are typically run out of land grant universities and are usually headed by faculty at that university. The water centers were founded in 1964 by the U.S. Congress to address the growing need for water research and development in the United States. Keep in mind that this was well before the Clean Water Act and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, so this left the U.S. Geological Survey all alone to do the nation’s water research and monitoring. Consequently, the water centers were a shiny new research effort that were addressing the big problems of the day, like how to clean up water pollution (take a look at our archives to see the breadth of the projects IWRC supported in the early days).

Water centers came under the direction of USGS in the 1980s and continue to receive some federal support to maintain a federal-state partnership. We here in Illinois are run out the same office (and staff) as the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, which means we get to enjoy great collaborations on research without having to leave our office.   

What does a water center do?

The water centers are intended to increase water knowledge and help young scientists and engineers enter water-focused careers. While this varies from center to center, one thing we all do is provide a small grants program out of our base funds. IWRC has titled this program Annual Small Grants, and these grants have resulted in some very interesting projects. Additionally, all water centers provide researchers in their state access to larger grants through the National Competitive Grants program run by the USGS. While the Sequester resulted in no National Competitive Grant awards this year, IWRC has sponsored many funded projects in the past.   

So is IWRC only interested in research?

Besides research funding, IWRC performs outreach and education and liaises with national organizations on Illinois’ behalf. Every two years, we host an Illinois Water conference, which allows anyone interested in water from around the state to present research, share ideas, and make connections. We also host the Private Well Class, which helps well owners safely manage their water supplies, and SmallWaterSupply.org, which provides reliable information for small municipal and tribal water suppliers.

Some new outreach we’ve done this year include planning a drought workshop as part of a professor’s outreach requirements in his grant and some classroom visits to discuss stormwater and recycling. We’ve also sought to make this blog and our twitter feeds a constant source of information and news about Illinois’ water resources and opportunities. If you have ideas of projects we could help you with or have an item you’d like us to highlight, please contact us. We love to hear the water news in Illinois, and we really love to share it.