For Nicole Ward, Wisconsin Sea Grant’s current J. Philip Keillor Great Lakes Fellow, returning to Madison for this opportunity has brought her academic journey full circle.

Keillor Fellow Dr. Nicole K. Ward (Submitted photo)

Ward earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison just over a decade ago, then left the Badger State for graduate studies in Idaho and Virginia. Yet Ward was eager to get back to the Upper Midwest and work on Great Lakes topics—making the Keillor Fellowship, which began June 1, an excellent fit for the newly minted Ph.D.

She is based at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Office of Great Waters, where she works closely with Madeline Magee, monitoring program coordinator, and Cherie Hagen, the Lake Superior Basin supervisor. Ward is also active in the Great Lakes Working Group of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI).

Broadly speaking, her focus is on incorporating climate change resilience planning into the DNR’s Great Lakes projects. The three main projects she’s associated with are:

  • The WICCI Great Lakes Working Group report, expected to be published online in late September. The report summarizes climate change effects on Great Lakes ecosystems and covers some potential solutions.
  • Great Lakes coastal wetlands: assessing the condition and resiliency of Wisconsin’s coastal wetlands in the face of climate change. This, in turn, could inform the prioritization of wetlands for restoration or protection.
  • Developing climate adaptation resources and information for DNR Office of Great Waters staff to ensure climate resiliency is built into all projects involving the Great Lakes and Mississippi River.

The range of duties draws upon Ward’s passion for freshwater ecosystems, but also allows her to grow her skillset. “I’ve worked in multiple other types of freshwater ecosystems, like rivers, streams, lakes and reservoirs, but this will add to my repertoire through working on the Great Lakes and coastal wetlands,” she said.

Nicole K. Ward explores some of Wisconsin’s waters by canoe. (Photo: Titus Seilheimer)

A native of Rochester, Minnesota, Ward spent three years with the Minnesota DNR working on native mussels and stream ecology after earning her bachelor’s degree.

Those years with the Minnesota DNR set her future direction in motion: “It was while snorkeling and scuba diving in the streams and rivers of Minnesota that I began seeing the effects of land management and decision-making that were far removed from the stream itself,” she said. “I had an ‘aha moment’ while working there, when I decided I needed to learn more about how people make environmental decisions, and how those decisions may change in response to changing ecosystems. The ever-changing and complex Great Lakes Basin is really the perfect place to apply my skills in understanding feedbacks between ecosystem change and human decision-making.”

After a master’s degree at the University of Idaho in water resources, doctoral work in biological sciences at Virginia Tech followed. There, she examined land use and climate change over the course of 31 years in the Lake Sunapee watershed in New Hampshire.

During her time at Virginia Tech, she also worked with a local lake association to co-produce an online, interactive data visualization tool for communicating with landowners about lawn management practices. She collaborated with a social psychologist to develop the tool and gauge its effectiveness.

This points to another area of interest: science communication and finding effective strategies for connecting with varied audiences. One of the key things she learned from working with the psychologist, Ward said, was that “Simple messaging is better. While you see that in the literature, this experience was a really direct, personal reality check of just how simple you need to keep things if engaging with a particular audience for the first time about a topic.”

The human dimension of environmental decisions is a throughline in her work. Said Ward, “A foundational part of how I think about myself as a scientist is to fully recognize that people make environmental decisions based on much more than just scientific evidence. Water issues are never actually about the water, they’re about the underlying values and priorities of people, and people have more shared values than we often recognize.”

The post Keillor Fellow to integrate climate change planning into Great Lakes and coastal wetlands projects first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

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Jennifer Smith

The January 2021 River Talk featured Kelly Beaster and Reed Schwarting with the Lake Superior Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Superior tag-teamed and presented, “Coastal wetlands: Dynamic ecosystems of Lake Superior.”

Kelly Beaster in the field. Image credit: Lake Superior Research Institute

Beaster and Schwarting have spent the past five years monitoring the health of local wetlands along Lake Superior, including those in the St. Louis River Estuary. They described the formation and function of coastal wetlands and how they change over time. They focused on vegetation, covering the more common plant communities and some of their unique species as well as how wetlands have adapted to the short-term and long-term flux of water levels in the Great Lakes.

Schwarting said sediment is key to wetlands formation. “Sediment can come from tributaries along Lake Superior, but it can come from shoreline erosion, as well. Plants eventually start to grow. This stabilizes the sediment and encourages more sediment deposition and plant growth.”

Beaster described the three classifications of coastal wetlands. All three are low in nutrients (oligotrophic) due to the northern climate and cold water in Lake Superior when compared to the other Great Lakes. The first type, lacustrine wetlands, tend to form near large open lakes, such as Lake Superior. The second, riverine, form at and along river mouths. Barrier wetlands are separated from the lake by some type of barrier like a sandbar or a railroad bed.

Schwarting said wetlands function as carbon storage locations, which is helpful with climate change. The cold water, especially in lacustrine wetlands, limits decomposition. Wild cranberry, pitcher plants and bog buckbean are common species they find in their surveys. Although they are not rare, Beaster said these species are among some of the first to disappear from wetlands when nutrient loading occurs or the water level changes. “Some type of disturbance happens and the diversity starts to drop down.”

Reed Schwarting in the field. Image credit: Lake Superior Research Institute

They have found a notable plant in the St. Louis River estuary. “It’s incredible to think we have aquatic ferns floating around. They are no bigger than your fingertip. They’re really common in the estuary,” Beaster said.

Cattails are often the first thing people think about when visualizing an emergent marsh, but Beaster said cattails are often a sign of problems. “Often, they signify nutrient-loading. Cattails also out-compete native plants. There can be toxic chemicals present or heavy metals.” Allouez Bay in the estuary is an example of one such area.

Schwarting said control measures for invasive species like cattails include chemical, mechanical and biological measures. But care must be taken. “It’s not enough to control these species. As soon as you control something, you’re basically creating a disturbance,” he said. “Normally, a lot of invasive species come in through disturbances, so you’re opening them back up to having another species either come in or even the same species being reintroduced from your disturbance. So, we want to do some restoration work on top of any control.” Some plants used in this way are wild rice and seedlings of other native species already at the location.

Schwarting said that wetlands along Lake Superior are doing well. “While there are some negatively impacted sites on Lake Superior, we probably have some of the more diverse and higher-quality wetlands in the Great Lakes region. Especially compared to the more industrial sites,” he said.

Beaster said one of the top five coastal wetlands they’ve been to is on Madeline Island. Bog Lake is a barrier wetland and fen on northern part of island. “Once we’ve boated out there, we have about three hours to do our surveys, but we’d rather spend three days because it’s so cool. This wetland is iconic of what an oligotrophic plant community should be on Lake Superior. We don’t see any invasive species here. It’s pretty stable – easy walking on the ground. Year after year we don’t really see any changes.”

She said Bog Lake isn’t the only high-quality, undisturbed wetland in the area. “This fortunately is here, intact, and it’s very encouraging especially when what we see in the St. Louis Estuary doesn’t always seem like it’s very high quality any longer. However, the estuary contains about 25 different oligotrophic species. Some of them are very common: wire sedge, bog birch and bog buckbean. When we’re out in these habitats and we know we have these remnants of oligotrophic species, it always brings to mind what the estuary used to look like, which is incredibly different from what we see now. But it is encouraging that we still have those oligotrophic species there, and we have done a lot over the years to stop our nutrient loading and to clean up some of the areas of concern. We’ve been controlling invasive species and I believe we’ll continue to control them even further once these areas are cleaned up. Eventually, we will have some semblance of these oligotrophic plant communities back, and they’ll be fairly functional, I hope.”

A video of their talk is available on YouTube here. The next River Talk will be held March 3 in conjunction with the St. Louis River Summit. The topic is “A River of Poems.” Poets from across the country will share their works about rivers.

The post River Talk explores life on the soggy side: coastal wetlands first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

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Blog – Wisconsin Sea Grant

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Marie Zhuikov