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April 2019 Edition of the
Michigan Soil and Water Conservation Society
E-Newsletter

The official newsletter of the Michigan Chapter
of the Soil and Water Conservation Society

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CONTENTS


CHAPTER UPDATES

President's Report: The Floodplain Dilemma
Michigan FFA Land Conservation Skills Contest

 

CONSERVATION NEWS

Soil Stewardship Week, April 28-May 5
Technology Spotlight: A "Magnet" for the Michigan Groundwater Community

What to Watch in Great Lakes Legislation


EVENTS

"When the land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by his land—when both end up better by reason of their partnership—then we have conservation." 

- Aldo Leopold 

CHAPTER UPDATES

President's Report

The Floodpain Dilemma: Good Farmland, and Part of the River
By John Freeland, March 27, 2019 

 

In Part 1 of his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold chronicles, a month at a time, the annual progression of changing natural events surrounding his farm in Wisconsin. From the April chapter:

“There are degrees and kinds of solitude. An island in a lake has one kind; but lakes have boats, and there is always the chance that one might land to pay you a visit. A peak in the clouds has another kind, but most peaks have trails, and trails have tourists.  I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese who have known more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.

So we sit on our hill beside a new-blown pasque and watch the geese go by. I see our road dipping gently into the waters, and I conclude (with inner glee, but exterior detachment) that the question of traffic, in or out, is for this day at least, debatable only among carp.”

I really admire Leopold’s writing, particularly its lyrical style with simple words and short phrases he weaves together without sounding “choppy.” He’s a bit of a “trickster,” though, by throwing in an unfamiliar term to challenge a few of us.  I needed to look up “pasque,” which is apparently a spring bloomer from the genus Anemone.
 

Watch Drone Video from then 2015 River Raisin Flood


It sounds as though Aldo had the company of other family members, perhaps his son Luna, as they sat on that hill watching geese. In Luna Leopold’sFlood Hydrology and the Floodplain.” Luna, who greatly advanced the field of fluvial geomorphology, describes the importance of understanding the role of floodplains in river dynamics. From the article (emphasis added):

“Because a river builds and maintains its channel large enough to contain only moderate discharge, the flow over the floodplain is a necessity, for the floodplain is part of the river. Most unregulated rivers in the world. large and small, reach or exceed bank full conditions about once a year. “

The floodplain is part of the river. It’s also private property, usually.

The floodplain also often contains the most fertile soil and, unlike the public resource river inside the channel, it is typically managed for farming with all that that implies including, potentially, livestock, mechanical disturbance of soil, erosion, drainage, loss of water storage function, fertilizers and pesticides.

It’s the overlap of private and public interests in floodplains, and other lands periodically connected to waterbodies, that makes their management so difficult. In an excellent paper “Learning from the Mississippi flood of 1993: Impacts, Management Issues and Areas for Research,” author Gerald Galloway examines the 14-month long weather conditions leading up to the 1993 flood, its wide array of impacts, and identifies numerous topics for research, including this one:

 

What floodplain management activities can be conducted without infringement on the property rights of floodplain land owners?  

While voluntary conservation practices are helping, water quality problems continue to cause problems around our region and folks are losing patience. On April 18, the Lucas County Commissioners filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court claiming the US EPA has not done its job as directed by the Clean Water Act to protect Toledo’s water supply from harmful algal blooms.

The court battle is expected to drag on for years.

John Freeland

President

Michigan Chapter SWCS Members Partner with MSU and USDA-NRCS at the Michigan FFA Land Conservation Skills Contest

Michigan Chapter SWCS members Dan Kesselring, Gaylynn Kinter and Karry Trickey assisted with the Michigan FFA Land Conservation Contest held on Friday, April 12, at Michigan State University farms.  Due to adverse weather, the contest had to be held indoors this year. 

The day before the contest, the Land Conservation Team collected soil samples and assembled them in the University Farm barns for observation the following day. 

Members of the team in the below photo are:  Chapter member Gaylynn Kinter, Retired USDA-NRCS; Carol Wade,  Retired USDA-NRCS; Martin Rosek, State Soil Scientist, USDA-NRCS; Dr. James Crum, Professor, MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources; Chapter member Karry Trickey, DC, USDA-NRCS, Mason Field Office; Chapter member Dan Kesselring,  Retired USDA-NRCS; and a doctoral student from MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Do you have some conservation-worthy news to share?  Upcoming events or topics of interest to the SWCS Professional Development Committee?  Please feel free to share them with newsletter editor, Rebecca Bender at rebecca.bender@miglswcs.org

CONSERVATION NEWS

Soil Stewardship Week, April 28-May 5 

The Michigan Soil and Water Stewardship Week Resolution has been finalized and will be read in the House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon, May 1.  The House of Representatives begins session at 1:00pm, with resolutions addressed early on the agenda, with an estimated time of 1:15 - 2:00pm, barring delays for caucus meetings. 
 
The public is welcome to attend, or you can watch the approval by the House of Representatives from the gallery and the Michigan Conservation Partnership (CDs/MACD, MDARD, and NRCS) will be recognized during the reading of the resolution.  Representative Alex Garza, District 12, sponsored the resolution.  District 12 includes all or part of the cities of Romulus and Taylor in Wayne County.

In 1955, the National Association of Conservation Districts began a national program to encourage Americans to focus on stewardship. Stewardship Week is officially celebrated from the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in May. It is one of the world's largest conservation-related observances.

The program relies on locally-led conservation districts sharing and promoting stewardship and conservation activities. Many Districts provide conservation and stewardship field days, programs, workshops and additional outreach efforts throughout their community to educate citizens about the need to care for our resources.

The Stewardship concept involves personal and social responsibility, including a duty to learn about and improve natural resources as we use them wisely, leaving a rich legacy for future generations.

One definition of Stewardship is "the individual's responsibility to manage his life and property with proper regard to the rights of others." E. William Anderson suggests stewardship "is essentially a synonym for conservation."

Stewardship Week helps to remind us all of the power each person has to conserve natural resources and improve the world.
 

Technology Spotlight: A "Magnet" for the Michigan Groundwater Community

by Zachary Curtis, PhD, MI-SWCS Chapter member and Environmental Engineer, Hydrosimulatics INC. (Lansing, MI) 

A new feature of the miSWCS newsletter is the “Technology Spotlight” – a section designed to inform readers about new technologies and tools for analysis for informed and evidence-based decision making. 

The first Spotlight focuses on a web-based technology useful for understanding Michigan groundwater: MAGNET, or a Multiscale Adaptive Global NETwork, for water (www.magnet4water.com/magnet).

MAGNET is a cloud-powered, free-to-use, data-enabled groundwater modeling platform built on fully-processed framework data needed to characterize groundwater conditions in the subsurface. For any place in Michigan, pre-processed inputs for the land surface, aquifer bottom, hydraulic conductivity (permeability of the geologic materials), and long-term average recharge (infiltration of precipitation/surface water into the subsurface) are available for users to ‘instantly’ simulate groundwater conditions and immediately evaluate model performance using physical groundwater data (water levels) available from a statewide water well database. All inputs and representations can be interactively modified and further customized base on study objectives, local data, and user experience/expertise. In this way, the data-enabled models built using MAGNET generate qualitatively accurate groundwater level distributions needed to guide more detailed analysis and monitoring. 

Specific improvements that can be made to the ‘preliminary’ data-enabled models include: 1) System-wide fine-tuning: adjusting hydraulic conductivity based on knowledge of local geology, sedimentology, etc.; adjusting system-wide recharge based on knowledge of regional precipitation, primary land cover, etc.; representing surface water bodies explicitly to describe exchange between groundwater and surface water; 2) Adding Human Impacts: adding pumping and/or injection wells; adding drain features and/or areas of artificial or restricted recharge; and creating and customizing groundwater pollution sources; and 3) Representing additional details: subdividing the aquifer into multiple computational layers to provide greater vertical resolution of processes; adding 3D hydraulic conductivity heterogeneity for representing discrete geologic features; adding additional aquifer layers for representing deeper geological units important to near-surface groundwater conditions; and adjusting the leakance (ease of flow) of individual surface seeps and surface water bodies.

Help buttons are embedded in the modeling interfaces, but interested readers are also referred the magnet4water.com for a user manual and tutorials and a comprehensive Digital Library of groundwater-related scientific and learning materials. Many of the tutorials can be completed with just a handful of buttons and keystrokes. 
 
MAGNET interface unifies access to numerous data sets and allows user inputs.

What to Watch in Great Lakes Legislation


This section is a summary and reminder of bills recently introduced or amended regarding  Great Lakes agriculture, environmental protection, and natural resources.
  • Prohibition of application of manure or fertilizer to frozen or snow-covered soil, SB 0247 referred to committee on Environmental Quality, passed in the House as HB 4418 on 3/21/19
  • Require notice and public hearing prior to authrizing hydraulic fracturing (HB 4474) bill electronically reproduced 4/18/19
A more complete listing of legislative action can be found at www.legislature.mi.gov and we encourage you to stay informed and to contact your representatives in the Senate and House of Representatives at the state and national level.
 

EVENTS

International SWCS


July 28-31, 2019 SWCS International Annual Conference
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
SWCS is seeking oral presentations, poster presentations, symposia and workshops for the 74th SWCS International Annual Conference


Other Organizations


May 13-15 Michigan Envirothon State Competition

Fort Custer, Calhoun County

June 3-4, 2019 MACD Summer Conference “Conservation Connections” 
Double Tree by Hilton, Bay City

July 26, 2019 MSU Agriculture Innovation Day, "Focus on Precision Agriculture that Pays" 
8:30am-5pm at MSU Farms 

MDEQ Calendar:

www.michigan.gov/deqcalendar


MDNR Calendar:

https://www.michigan.gov/dnr/
 

MSU Extension Calendar:

http://msue.anr.msu.edu/events
 
Copyright © 2019 Soil and Water Conservation Society: Michigan Chapter, All rights reserved.

This newsletter is a monthly compilation of news stories of interest to Michigan SWCS members and stakeholders. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect official policy of the Soil and Water Conservation Society unless so stated.

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