U. S. Environmental Protection Agency

Blog | Wisconsin Sea Grant

https://www.seagrant.wisc.edu/blog/how-people-connect-to-the-st-louis-river-estuary/

A new use for an old technology

On: February 11, 2025

In: biomagnification of nanoplastics, desalinization plants, Great Lakes, Haoran Wei, Lake Explorer II, Lake Mendota, Mohan Qin, nanoplastics, NOAA, Sarah Janssen, semipermeable membranes, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Reverse osmosis membranes could revolutionize nanoplastic sampling in the Great Lakes

Nanoplastics continue to build up, largely unnoticed, in the world’s bodies of water and inside people’s bodies. Image of Lake Mendota by Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant.

The target is small. Very small. Researchers have shined the light on environmental dangers posed by microplastics – small pieces of plastic from clothing and packaging that pollute waterways. Now, however, they are also focusing on nanoplastics, which are even smaller plastic particles – invisible to the naked eye and even under a regular microscope, and smaller in diameter than a human hair.

Linked to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in people, nanoplastics continue to build up, largely unnoticed, in the world’s bodies of water and inside people’s bodies. They’re everywhere. Researchers think nanoplastics may be more harmful than microplastics because, “The smaller their size is, the higher toxicity they have,” said Haoran Wei, assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s a higher surface area on nanoplastic particles, which can accumulate more toxic chemicals and other contaminants on their surfaces. They’re small enough to get into living cells, so can directly harm creatures in the Great Lakes.”

Unfortunately, the presence and distribution of nanoplastics in the Great Lakes is still largely unknown. One reason is that current sampling methods are onerous – requiring collection and transport of hundreds to thousands of gallons of water from the lakes into the lab for analysis.

There’s got to be a better way, right? Thanks to Wisconsin Sea Grant funding, Wei and Mohan Qin, also an assistant professor at the department of civil and environmental engineering at UW-Madison, are working to solve the problem by looking at a new use for an old technology.

Haoran Wei (right) explains how microplastic and nanoplastic samples are analyzed in the lab while Ziyan Wu, a Ph.D. student on the project, watches. Image credit: Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

Desalinization plants have long used semipermeable membranes to take salt out of seawater through reverse osmosis. The membranes, made of polymers, have tiny pores that allow pressurized water to flow through them but catch things like salt. They can also catch nanoplastics. Qin and Wei are developing a portable membrane filtration device that researchers can use on a ship to process large volumes of water out on the lake instead of bringing the water back to the lab. They’ll collect the nanoplastics on a series of membranes and just bring those, or a concentrated water sample, back to the lab for analysis.

Sarah Janssen, a supervisory research chemist with the U.S. Geological Survey, is going to help Qin and Wei with the project this summer in coordination with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to collect water samples on their Lake Explorer II research vessel from lakes Superior and Ontario. But before they head out on the ship, they’ll test the membrane filter device with purified water in the lab and later with water from some local lakes, like Lake Mendota.

Mohan Qin describes environmental issues caused by nanoplastics while standing next to a different plastics research project conducted atop the Limnology Building at UW-Madison, which looked at how light degrades microplastics. Image credit: Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

Wei said that if successful, their project will be the first to develop a sequential membrane filtration sampler that collects and concentrates nanoplastics from a large volume of lake water. “And we definitely will be the first ones to carry this filter on a boat in connection with nanoplastics,” he said.

Qin and Wei will be helped by four college students and hope this method can be used by other agencies and water industries for microplastic and nanoplastic sampling. They also plan to work with Sea Grant’s Emerging Contaminants Scientist, Gavin Dehnert, to bring information about the project to Tribal communities and to participate in events like UW-Madison’s Day at the Capitol. “All my students love Capitol Days,” said Qin. “They will have the opportunity to work with people from the real world and talk about the problems researchers are working on.”

This project is related to a microplastics and food web project that Wei leads which was recently funded by NOAA. He said the goal of that project is to figure out if microplastics and nanoplastics can get into the Great Lakes food web. “We want to see if they get biomagnified up the food chain,” Wei said. “We’re going to do a lot of analysis and bioaccumulation experiments.”

The post A new use for an old technology first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

https://www.seagrant.wisc.edu/news/a-new-use-for-an-old-technology/

Shipboard Science Workshop for Teachers

On: January 27, 2025

In: Center for Great Lakes Literacy, Lake Guardian, Lake Michigan, Sea Grant, Shipboard Science teacher workshop, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency

The post Shipboard Science Workshop for Teachers first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

Blog | Wisconsin Sea Grant

https://www.seagrant.wisc.edu/blog/shipboard-science-workshop-for-teachers/

Wisconsin Sea Grant

2025 Shipboard Science Workshop on Lake Michigan

On: January 13, 2025

In: 2025 shipboard science workshop, Center for Great Lakes Literacy, Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, Lake Guardian, Lake Michigan, NOAA, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency

Apply today for the 2025 Shipboard Science Workshop aboard the U.S. EPA R/V Lake Guardian on Lake Michigan

Formal and nonformal 5-12th grade educators from Great Lakes’ states are invited to apply for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend a week aboard a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research vessel alongside scientists and to bring the Great Lakes back to their classrooms. The workshop, organized by the Center for Great Lakes Literacy (CGLL), is July 7-13, 2025. Deadline for applications is Feb. 10, 2025.

Through a partnership with the EPA Great Lakes National Program Office and NOAA, and funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, educators will engage in scientific research aboard the ship. Hosts for the Lake Michigan workshop are CGLL partners Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and Wisconsin Sea Grant.

The annual Shipboard Science Workshops promote Great Lakes sciences while forging lasting relationships between Great Lakes researchers and educators. CGLL is a collaborative effort led by Sea Grant educators throughout the Great Lakes watershed in the U.S. CGLL fosters informed and responsible decisions that advance basin-wide stewardship by providing hands-on experiences, educational resources and networking opportunities promoting Great Lakes literacy among an engaged community of educators, scientists and youth.

For more information on the 2025 Shipboard Science Workshop and application materials visit the Center for Great Lakes Literacy website .

The post 2025 Shipboard Science Workshop on Lake Michigan first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

In: Casey Garhart, Great Lakes Beach water quality testing, Madeline Magee, Natalie Chin, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, Virtual Beach, Wisconsin Coastal Management Program, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

https://www.seagrant.wisc.edu/news/2025-shipboard-science-workshop-on-lake-michigan/

Wisconsin Sea Grant

Checking beach health virtually

On: June 3, 2024

A path to a beach on northern Lake Michigan. Image credit: Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

With the unusually warm winter this year, swimsuit season might be approaching earlier than previous ones. With recreational beach season comes the scientific testing to ensure beaches are safe for the public. An estimated 8 million people visit Great Lakes beaches every year. Unfortunately, because traditional testing methods take 18-24 hours to process, information used to evaluate water quality and communicate health risks is generally a day old, meaning swimmers might be recreating when conditions aren’t safe. On the other hand, swimmers could be kept out of the water at times when no problems exist.

An analysis published in 2014* determined that nearly one in five decisions to post or remove swim advisories were made in error in the Great Lakes (between 2008 and 2010), including nearly 3,000 unnecessary advisories/closures and at least 4,500 missed advisories or closures.

A free Windows software developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency named Virtual Beach addresses these shortcomings by providing beach managers with timely and cost-effective alternatives to traditional monitoring. It can help them to decide whether to issue (or lift) swim advisories/closures on a given day.

By using the software to build a model, users can predict water quality conditions at any time, on both sampled and non-sampled beaches that are monitored on the Great Lakes Coasts.

With a grant from the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program, Wisconsin Sea Grant has updated video tutorials that accompany six training modules for the Virtual Beach software and created a training course that can be completed at any time via the Canvas platform. Beach managers can use it to familiarize themselves with the software.

“While our Virtual Beach training modules have been available for several years, the decommissioning of the data service EnDDaT limited their usability. Our new course explains how to collect the data needed to build a Virtual Beach model without EnDDaT and allows beach managers to go through Virtual Beach training on their own time,” said Natalie Chin, Wisconsin Sea Grant’s climate and tourism outreach specialist.

Chin worked with Madeline Magee with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Casey Garhart with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension’s Instructional Design Unit to develop training materials. If you are interested in completing Virtual Beach training, please contact Natalie at nchin5@wisc.edu.

The Virtual Beach software was developed by the U.S. EPA’s Ecosystem Research Division, in partnership with the USGS Wisconsin Water Science Center, the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources and Wisconsin Sea Grant.

* Expanded Beach “Nowcast” Modeling Across Wisconsin, Adam Mednick and Dreux Watermolen, Bureau of Science Services, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, August 2014.

The post Checking beach health virtually first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

https://www.seagrant.wisc.edu/news/checking-beach-health-virtually/

In: Alexandra Pesano, Allie Pesano, black-capped chickadees, Emily Pavlovic, Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory, house wrens, Human Health and Environment Research Fellows Program, John Haselman, Matt Etterson, PFAS and birds, tree swallows, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, University of Minnesota Duluth

Allie Pesano: On a treasure hunt for birds

On: January 25, 2023

Allie Pesano. Submitted photo.

Allie Pesano first got turned onto birds as an undergraduate at Unity College in Maine. She was studying wildlife biology and, for one class, students were required to learn about various common North American wildlife species. The variety of birds sparked her curiosity, ultimately leading to her current six-month fellowship in avian toxicology with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Great Lakes Toxicology and Ecology Division in Duluth, Minnesota.

“I realized that every bird I saw wasn’t the same thing,” Pesano said. “They’re all very nuanced and unique. That led to my interest in learning more about birds in general. Even in my spare time, I would flip through the bird guide and just kind of go on a treasure hunt in my own back yard to see what kinds of birds were around.”

Her back yard was in Syracuse, New York. After obtaining her undergraduate degree, she flitted about the country like a bird, researching migrating hawks in Nevada, nesting endangered sparrows in Florida and resilient saltmarshes in Massachusetts, which, of course, provide homes for wetland birds. Most recently, she graduated with a master’s degree in integrated biosciences from the University of Minnesota Duluth. There, in collaboration with the Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory, she used satellite transmitters to determine where some unique, dark-plumaged red-tailed hawks were migrating from on their way through Duluth. These hawks are usually only found in the western part of North America and are rare in the East. This bird treasure hunt led her to northeastern Canada.

One of the dark-plummaged red-tailed hawks that Pesano studied for her master’s research. This bird was captured in the Twin Cities (Minnesota) in February 2021, and was named “Manley.” He was the first dark red-tailed hawk fitted with a satellite transmitter. Manley spent the last two summers in northern Manitoba and has returned to the same winter territory in the Twin Cities since researchers have been studying his movements. Submitted photo.

“We discovered they had been spending summers and the breeding season in northern Manitoba and Ontario. Birds that look really dark like that would not, to our historical knowledge, be nesting and breeding in those provinces usually. They would more likely nest in Alaska or British Columbia,” Pesano said.

Pesano’s latest quest involves researching the impacts of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) on the reproductive success of birds in the Duluth area. Under the mentorships of Matt Etterson and John Haselman at the EPA, Pesano is studying tree swallows, black-capped chickadees and house wrens with another EPA Fellow, Emily Pavlovic. Funded by the University of Wisconsin-Madison but working in Duluth, Pesano is looking into things like the quality and quantity of food to see if there’s any correlation between what the birds are eating and their reproductive success.

The goal of this research is to create a toxicology model that scientists can use to predict, based on contamination concentrations in the environment, what the exposure risk would be to birds in that area.

Pesano checks a tree swallow nest as part of her EPA avian PFAS study. Submitted photo.

The three-year U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Human Health and the Environment Research Fellows program is a partnership between the EPA, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its Aquatic Sciences Center. The goal is to train the next generation of scientists in environmental and ecosystem health.

The post Allie Pesano: On a treasure hunt for birds first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

https://www.seagrant.wisc.edu/news/allie-pesano-on-a-treasure-hunt-for-birds/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=allie-pesano-on-a-treasure-hunt-for-birds