Our paper on the impacts of wastewater treatment plants on whole-stream metabolism has just been published and is available here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0256292. In this paper, we looked at nine sites located above or below four WWTPs to see how metabolism and dissolved oxygen changed over 13 months. We found some of the highest rates of GPP and ER above any WWTP influence, and spatial patterns in metabolism were most strongly controlled by light. That said, metabolism rates were higher below plants than above, but this impact was attenuated within about 1-3 km of stream length. We also looked at DO criteria used by stream managers to assess ecosystem health and found the highest number of potential violations above any WWTP impact. We also found that, if average DO is used, longer monitoring periods result in fewer violations (so violations are not chronic), but if absolute number of violations is used, this will discourage long-term monitoring to fully understand how the stream functions across time!
The lab is excited to welcome Alisha Guglielmi and Raquel Oliva on board! Alisha is joining us from Salem State and will be working on the NSF project trying to scale-up our findings- how many beaver ponds are there in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh, what is attracting beaver to these sites and what is their larger-scale impact? Raquel is joining from UGA and the urban hydrology research world is her oyster (project TBD)!
Very excited to announce that the Department of Geosciences has been awarded an instrumentation grant from the NSF to purchase an LA-ICPMS (and a Mars digestor!), a project that I am a co-PI on. For our hydrologic interests, we hope to use this equipment to start to look at heavy metal distributions in Atlanta streams to understand the impact of historical industrial uses and ongoing environmental justice issues around known contamination sites that are not being addressed, such as the Tift Hazardous Waste Site at the headwaters of the South River. More information about the award can be found at: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2124655&HistoricalAwards=false
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