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SUMMER 2006
The River Doctor Is In
by Kathleen Cason

A UGA scientist has spent a career helping to restore the health of U.S. waterways…rural and urban alike.

As a child growing up in the 1950s, Judy Meyer enjoyed collecting tadpoles, trapping crayfish and building little rock dams in the river near her home in Wauwatosa, Wis. In those days, it was safe to splash around in the stream that ran through the Milwaukee suburb.

“I could play in the Menomonee River,” said Meyer, who is now a stream ecologist at the University of Georgia. “In fact, I know two other river conservationists who also played there as kids.”

But today, the Menomonee joins a growing number of American rivers that are impaired or polluted, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Nationwide, that’s one out of three rivers. In Georgia alone, some 600 streams fail to meet Clean Water Act standards.

“Lawn fertilization and wastewater runoff, for example, add excess nutrients to local streams, and that can then have effects as far-reaching as algal blooms in West Point Lake, Ga., and the ‘dead zone’ of the Gulf of Mexico,” said Meyer, a Distinguished Research Professor of Ecology. “As long as a stream is healthy, it is self-cleansing. The community of plants and animals in and adjacent to a stream can absorb and process nutrients and pollutants. But if too much is added, the system breaks down.”

After the Clean Water Act passed more than three decades ago, billions were spent on sewage treatment plants, loss of wetlands slowed, and the most severely polluted waterways began to recover. Even so, more than 40 percent of the nation’s freshwater rivers and lakes are unsafe for fishing or swimming today. And rapid urbanization and suburban sprawl pose new challenges to river health.

So, from big rivers like the Mississippi to small streams like Tanyard Branch running below UGA’s Sanford Stadium, public and private groups are working to restore the health of U.S. waterways.

Meyer has spent nearly 30 years at UGA investigating how river systems work and how to keep them healthy. Her research has focused on nutrient pollution in rivers, on the ecological processes that contribute to water quality, and on the effects of manmade disturbances to river ecosystems.

Her research has earned her many honors. She was elected president of the Ecological Society of America. She is a 2002 National Clean Water Act Hero, recipient of the 2003 Award of Excellence from the North American Benthological Society (“benthological” refers to aquatic life on lake and river bottoms), and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Throughout her career, Meyer has been interested in the food web of streams. As leaves fall into streams and decay, organic material leaches out and that becomes the primary food source for microbes. Aquatic insects eat the microbes and then in turn become food for fish.

“If I have made a contribution to science, it has been emphasizing the important contribution of microbes to the food web in streams,” she said. “The microbes are crucial for supporting the web of life in the river as a whole. They feed the food web.”

Her early studies involved headwater streams — the network of small upstream creeks that flow into larger streams — at the Coweeta Hydrological Lab in the Southern Appalachians. Meyer and colleagues have monitored the effect of clear cutting on a stream in the Coweeta watershed and found that some aspects of stream health recover within a decade but ecosystem function has not been fully restored even after 25 years. She also pursued her interest in the food web, examining the role of dissolved organic carbon. By the mid-1980s, she continued studying the role of organic carbon in the Ogeechee River, a blackwater river that flows through swamps and wetlands in Georgia’s coastal plain.

“I started out my career working in the mountains and working on blackwater rivers,” Meyer said. “Then I had a midlife crisis. I remember waking up one morning and realizing that the streams around here [in the city of Athens] aren’t like the streams I’d been studying. They’re filled with sediments, they’re channelized, they’re running through culverts.

“A number of my colleagues said, ‘Oh Judy, urban streams are so trashed. Just write them off,” Meyer said.

Instead, she began to look at urban streams.

In the Atlanta-area, she examined the ability of urban streams to remove excess nutrients from the water. She and her colleagues and students compared streams in forested, agricultural, suburban and urban watersheds. They found that the more urban the watershed, the less able streams are to remove nutrients.

“It’s more than overloading stream systems with nutrients,” Meyer said. “When it rains, urban streams flood more quickly because the vegetation may have been removed along the banks or the channel has been straightened or the stream runs through a pipe. Even if you have a healthy riparian zone, once the leaves fall in they aren’t held in place because you have frequent floods coming through.”

Leaves in urban streams are swept downstream in the frequent floods or are physically battered to bits, not allowing microbial processes to release the organic carbon that fuels the bottom of the food web.

Elizabeth Sudduth, a recent UGA master’s student with Meyer, examined the effect of stream restoration on urban stream health. Sudduth, now at Duke University, compared the health of unrestored streams in Atlanta to restored streams where local government or AmeriCorps groups had stabilized eroded stream banks with coconut fiber, willow cuttings and plantings. She found that bank stabilization with vegetation improved shelter and food supply for keystone aquatic insects, the “canaries in the mine” of stream health. Sensitive aquatic insects are absent from streams with excess nutrients or too much sediment. So like the sensitive canary in the mine, the presence of aquatic insects is an indicator of stream health.

In Sudduth’s study, the stabilized banks supported a healthy circle of life. Plants supply the leaves and organic materials that feed the microbes that feed the insects that feed the fish. Plants along the stream can absorb water, reduce flooding, and improve the stream’s ability to remove excess nutrients introduced by human activity.

“I went into this project with the idea that this bank stabilization was just a Band-Aid on a huge problem,” Sudduth said. “I didn’t know if it would actually make a difference. But it does. That was a good surprise.”

“Planting trees on the stream’s bank isn’t going to make it like it used to be 200 years ago,” Meyer said. “That’s an unrealistic expectation. But it does improve the overall health of the waterway.”

Nearly four years ago, Meyer and Sudduth joined top river-systems experts from eight universities and river conservation groups to form a partnership to improve the “science and practice of river restoration.” The idea was to rigorously evaluate current practices and use research to guide future restoration efforts. The group began by compiling the first comprehensive database on nationwide river restoration projects. Now called the National River Restoration Science Synthesis database, it includes data from more than 37,000 restoration projects. Meyer and Sudduth led the effort to collect and analyze data for the Southeast.

“This database will help scientists, practitioners and policymakers think more holistically about when restoration needs to happen and help set priorities,” Meyer said.

The group reported on the state of efforts to restore U.S. streams and rivers in the April 29, 2005, issue of the journal Science. The paper identifies 13 restoration project types and their average costs based on goals such as recreation, curbing erosion of riverbanks, dam removal, habitat improvement, and storm-water management.

The scientists also identified data that needs to be reported to help guide future efforts. For example, only 58 percent of the projects listed in the database include associated costs, though the researchers conservatively estimate that about $1 billion has been spent nationwide each year on restoration projects since 1990. For the mere 10 percent of projects that monitored and assessed results, most did not evaluate the impact of restoration on the ecosystem. The authors thus recommended that restoration projects evaluate whether environmental benefits have been achieved.

In a companion article published in the April 2005 Journal of Applied Ecology, the same group outlined five criteria for measuring a restoration project’s ecological success: setting a guiding vision, measuring ecosystem improvements, causing no permanent damage during implementation, creating a sustainable ecosystem that requires minimal intervention, and conducting pre- and post-project assessments.

“Doing a large group study can put what’s going on in the Southeast into a national perspective,” Meyer said. “We can see how we’re doing.” For example, she said that 27 percent of restoration projects in the Southeast include post-project monitoring, which is better than the national average.

Most projects in Georgia are done for riparian management, water quality management, bank stabilization and channel reconfiguration. Project goals are similar in other Southeastern states, although land acquisition for stream restoration is less frequently done in Georgia than in the other Southeastern states included in the database.

Meyer has long been interested in the implications that research has for policy. She has served on boards or technical advisory committees of the Georgia state legislature, American Rivers, Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, the National Academies’ National Research Council, the Pacific Rivers Council, the Oregon River Council and more. In 2000, she co-founded UGA’s River Basin Science and Policy Center, which promotes research, policy analysis, technical and legal assistance, and other forms of outreach.

As chair of the scientific and technical advisory committee for American Rivers, a river conservation group, she has been involved with two recent Supreme Court cases.

“One case dealt with headwater streams and wetlands; the other was about whether water flowing over a dam is truly a discharge,” she said. “In both, there were real issues of science that needed to be stated so the judges can make informed rulings.”

Understanding the importance of headwater streams to overall health of rivers will help the Court rule on how far upstream the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction extends, she said. Understanding what changes occur to water that flows into a reservoir — differences in temperature, oxygen levels, metal and nutrient concentration — will help determine that a dam negatively impacts water quality and water flowing over it qualifies as a discharge, as defined by the Clean Water Act.

She also recently testified at natural resources committee meetings of the Georgia state legislature. Meyer explained the results of a three-year study to examine the effect of changing the width of riparian buffer zones on mountain trout streams. She was part of the team that completed the study, which was funded by Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division.

“In 2000, the Georgia legislature reduced the buffer zone from 100 to 50 feet on trout streams,” she said. Strips of land left in a natural state help reduce erosion, mitigate the effect of flooding, provide habitat, filter pollutants and reduce stream temperatures.

“We saw a phenomenal decrease in trout when you went from a 100-foot buffer to a 50-foot buffer,” she said. “The narrow buffer reduced young trout population by 80 percent due to higher water temperatures and increased sediment in the water. This buffer issue is another example where science can make a real contribution.”

As Meyer prepares to retire this year, she plans to expand her involvement with conservation organizations and apply her expertise to policy issues related to healthy waterways, including urban watersheds.

“In urban landscapes, little creeks represent a rare link between humans and nature,” Meyer said. “There are streams that kids shouldn’t play in but other streams are in good shape. We should make it so that all children can play in our streams. That should be our goal.”

For more information on the National River Restoration Science Synthesis, log on to www.restoringrivers.org or email Judy Meyer at jlmeyer@uga.edu.