A Dissertation is Born!

I've finally broken through my mental block and figured out what the hell I'm doing!  Ever since I agreed to do this EPA grant, I knew the basic area that I wanted to focus on, but a specific project has eluded me.  So here's a rough sketch of where I'm going.  Since moving to NYC, I've become very interested in the city's method of water supply.  The whole city of 8million people have their water supplied by a naturally filtered system of aqueducts and reservoirs.  Because the water is naturally filtered by the watershed and reservoirs, the city does not need to use chlorine or other chemical treatments.  Part of keeping the water coming in clean enough to be solely cleaned by natural filtration is making sure the streams in the watersheds that feed into the city are in good health.

Lower New York also has a lot of agriculture; livestock, orchards, and grain fields are all over the lower Hudson Valley.  Many of these agricultural operations have stream that pass through them.  Often times, these streams catch nutrient rich fertilizer runoff from the orchards and fields, and those that pass through livestock properties often have, ahem, "direct" nutrient deposition.  These streams are also often impacted by animals walking through them, disturbing the substrate, and also machines rolling through them maintaining fields.  Agricultural streams are a bit of a consternation for NYC's water supply.  We don't want to decrease agriculture, but city dwellers want clean water...So, what to do...

Using the legislation of the Clean Water Act, the EPA developed a series of Best Management Practices (BMPs) that farmers could implement on any streams running through their property.  BMPs can be as simple as putting a fence between the cows and the stream to as complex as building wetlands and riparian buffer strips between their farms and the stream.   Currently there's been a lot of research looking at how effective individual BMPs are at reducing factors such as sedimentation and nutrient enrichment, and increasing biodiversity and food web connections.  However most studies only last a season.  There have been multiple studies one any one given stream, but not in a meaningful temporal span. As an additional confounding factor, BMPs cost money to the farmers to implement.  But often they don't want to go through the trouble of the paper of applying for government funding, and once they've got a BMP often government busy-bodies want to come on their property to investigate it.  Farmers fear that they will be told that they're not doing it right, have to spend more money on it, allow snoopers on their land, etc. Crazy farmers....

So here's my plan.  Working with people in the know, I'd like to identify agricultural streams that have had BMPs placed on them recently, less recently, not at all, and some pristine non-ag streams, and then follow them for 3 years (how many research summers I have left).  The premise here is that I want to find out how long it takes for a BMP stream to either stabilize or approach something resembling "pristine".  These poor worried farmers don't want the government interfering in their business anymore than they need to, so determining how functional BMP streams are is important for reducing the amount of bothering us nosy scientists need to do.  My ideas are a little haphazard and scatter-brained right now, but I promise they'll become more fully formed in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for listening and I call dibs on this idea!!!!