Transcript:

 

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello everybody and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists, for scientists.

JIM IPPOLITO 0:07
My gut is telling me that this is where we’re going to see the best bang for our buck in terms of return on investment, for improving carbon in our soils, it’s going to be in the Western United States, we’re going to see drastic improvements. And I’ll tell you from some of my experiences with other soil health projects, that if you do things, quote, right, you might see a change in less than five years. In fact, we had a project over on the western slope of Colorado where we saw changes in three years in terms of organic carbon accumulation in the soil surface in three years.

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:41
That’s a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continues. Today’s guests are Steve Blecker and Jim Ippolito. Steve Blecher, is a research soil scientist with the Ag Experiment Station at Colorado State University. He obtained his Bachelor’s at Penn State University and graduate degrees and pathology at Colorado State University. His research focuses on sustainable agriculture, soil health and range land restoration. Steve is actively involved in collaborative projects with the farming community and contributes to the advancement of sustainable and resilient agricultural practices. Jim Ippolito is currently a professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University. He obtained his Bachelor’s in agronomy from the University of Delaware, and his graduate degrees in soil chemistry, fertility and quality from Colorado State University. Jim is an expert in and teaches soil fertility and soil health principles and practices. He is actively involved in research, teaching and extension activities, working to improve soil health and fertility for the benefit of farmers, land managers and the environment. And today, they’re here to talk about their research into agro ecosystem management, soil health, and Ecosystem Sustainability and resiliency. So Steve, and Jim, thanks so much for being here.

STEVE BLECKER 2:09
Glad to be here.

JIM IPPOLITO 2:09
Yeah, thanks for having us Brad.

BRAD NEWBOLD 2:12
Alright. So today, we wanted to talk about a few of your projects and research interest. But first, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be involved in soil science and your particular specialties?

STEVE BLECKER 2:25
Yeah, I just sort of wandered into soils, really, I mean, I didn’t really like I didn’t really know what I wanted to do at Penn State and I just kept kind of wandering around taking different classes. And the day, I took the I took an intro to soils class, and then it just something just clicked. I was like, wow, this is really cool. I mean, people actually study soils, I mean, wow. So I just took all the soils classes, I could get a hold of, and then my undergrad ran out, and I just wanted to keep going. So turned to grad school. And it’s learning about soils ever since.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:03
what got you involved in in kind of the agricultural side and with extension activities?

STEVE BLECKER 3:08
Well, that’s pretty recent development. For me, I was I was doing more basic research for most of my for a lot of my career anyway. And, and just kind of once, when I came back to Colorado, and in my current position, there was this opportunity to do a lot more kind of applied research, just kind of work with growers in different agro ecosystems, it just kind of you know it was exciting to me to be able to, you know, instead of, I used to publish in, not that I don’t publish anymore, but in scientific journals, and maybe read by a handful of people, but now it’s just it’s more I’m more interested in kind of connecting with growers and just letting helping them understand the soils that they’re working with.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:56
And Jim, how about you?

JIM IPPOLITO 3:58
Well, my, my path into soils is much like Steve’s like, when I was an undergrad, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was geared towards sciences, like science is in my blood, basically, in my genes. And I knew I didn’t want to go into chemistry. My, my family has a long history of being in the chemistry field. So I steered clear of chemistry. I really steered clear of chemistry. And then I stumbled across horticulture class when I was a freshman. I said, Oh, that’s interesting. Let me go see if there’s any other classes that are offered within the College of Ag at the University of Delaware. And just like Steve, I took Intro to soil science. And I was hooked. I just, it just felt right. And lo and behold, there is a lot of chemistry in soil science. And so I’m a chemist. I consider myself a soil chemist and I love it. I just love what I do. I’ve been involved with a lot of different sectors though. A lot of ag over my 30 plus year career, in fact, most of it has been an ag but also in, in sites that have been contaminated with heavy metals, or more recently sites that are contaminated with these forever chemical compounds, PFAS’s and PFOA’s. And, you know, just solving problems, I’m, I’m really an applied soil chemist, I love what I do. And, and I’ve known Steve, we both known each other’s for oh my gosh, since 1990, we went to grad school together at Colorado State University, and our paths have just done this, we’ve interwoven our paths over the over the years. So, which is why we still work together.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:42
That’s good. That’s good that you guys still like each other, then after working together so long, more or less. And I do hope that maybe we can come back and talk about those forever chemicals. That was kind of a side, you know, side discussion that I think is really interesting and pertinent to a lot of stuff that’s been, you know, popping up recently. I mean, but anyway, we’ll come maybe we’ll come back to that later. So one of the one of the I guess, themes, or I guess, overarching research interests that seems to be within both of your specialties deals with soil health, or what we have now call soil health I know, in the intro, Jim, we talked about your or I mentioned that your degrees were in soil chemistry, fertility quality, which is kind of what now we would term soil health. I was wondering if you if you guys could just kind of give us a give our audience a basic overview of what we what is considered now soil health, what are the the principles that that go into soil health? You know, how do we, how do we quantify or measure soil health and kind of all those kinds of things?

STEVE BLECKER 6:54
Okay, I’ll take a crack at it, and then fill in the gaps, Steve, because, you know, when I think about soil health, and when I talk about soil health to a lot of people that maybe are not strongly familiar with soil health, this is how I approach it, I approach it much like discussing human health. And when we go to the doctor, because maybe we don’t feel right, and the doctor runs a bunch of tests on us, right, so a doctor may ask you to run on a treadmill, for example, to take a look at maybe physical health, you’ll get a blood draw. So blood might be chemical health, and sooner or later down the line, somebody’s probably going to start taking some gut microbiome samples from you. And that’s a measure of biological health. So when we talk about health, especially with humans, we oftentimes never talk about health directly, but we look at the measurements that we think get are geared towards human health or the like, good human health, if you will, we do the same thing with soils. So in soils, we look at soil physical characteristics, chemical characteristics, and certainly biological characteristics. And we look for the sometimes we call it the sweet spot, at least that’s what I call it, where all three of these physical, chemical and biological overlap. And, you know, you can think of three circles overlapping. Many of us have used this analogy before, and looking at where that circle in the center encompasses the, quote, best of physical, chemical and soil, biological health. So that’s, that’s my approach. And to be honest with you, I’ve used this approach for oh my gosh, almost my entire career without even knowing it. What do you think, Steve?

Man, that’s a hard act to follow. I like the analogy with the human health. I hadn’t thought of that. That’s pretty good. But no, I mean, you’re right. It’s the name has changed, didn’t always used to be soil health, but the things we measure, I mean, there’s three major biology, chemistry and the physical properties of soil. I mean, you’re right. I mean, that’s, that’s how they interact, to determine, you know, how healthy your soil is going to be for, you know, what the end uses, in our case, a lot of its agriculture. So how do these different properties interact.

BRAD NEWBOLD 9:13
So, so along with with what you’re talking about with, you know, I guess, using continuing with that analogy or metaphor of, of human health, are there? I guess there’s two questions that I have here. And maybe they’re kind of kind of overlapping here. But within when we’re dealing with human health, you know, we will check our pulse to see if we’re still alive, right. That’s kind of a very basic, basic overview of how you’re doing right if you’re, you’re healthy, you’re alive. But But like you said, there’s there’s other aspects as well. Are there and I don’t I don’t want to say are there shortcuts but are there are there particular measurements or characteristics of the soil itself, where you can kind of say, hey, kind of just take a quick snapshot and say, soil is doing pretty good because of XY and Z? Or is it something where you really do have to dig in to each of those physical, biological and chemical characteristics to really say how healthy that soil is?

STEVE BLECKER 10:23
Yeah, that’s a great question. I, I don’t know if there’s any shortcuts, because every soil is different. And every, even if the soil is the same, the management practices under which the soil is, is under Well, that’s the management practices that are being applied to a soil, even if the soil is the same changes the soil, we all know that. So quantifying soil health is, it can be somewhat tricky, because if you want to take a shortcut, and you know, a shortcut in one soil, it may not be applicable for a completely different soil. And so I think about the programs that we run at Colorado State University and Ohio State University, and we look at a number of different indicators or soil characteristics that encompass physical, chemical and biological health. And what we tried to do is tease out the minimum data set, that would be for a specific soil, or maybe a specific management system, or something along those lines, which is basically what we’re doing with a number of projects that we have at Colorado State University. And we don’t want to have a producer sending a soil sample to our testing facility or another testing facility to analyze for 20 different characteristics when maybe only three are necessary. That’s, that’s the sweet spot that we look for in these different systems.

BRAD NEWBOLD 11:50
I guess what would soil like you said, there’s, there’s differences between, you know, how soil might look or a particular type of soil within varied, you know, agricultural, or other land management uses. How would How would a, I guess, what would a healthy soil look like? If we want to, you know, stereotype we’re whatever, what would a healthy soil look like? In, you know, an agricultural field versus a healthy soil? Say, even just in, you know, general environment? So with, you know, within? I don’t know, if if getting into forestry is too deep for you guys, or whatever? And versus, you know, I don’t know, if if we’re dealing with soil health as much in you know, more of the civil engineering side of things. There’s different things that they look at for that, but how would How would a healthy soil? What would a healthy healthy soil look like in those different situations? And is there some, some overlap? Or would you expect completely different soil profile profiles to I don’t want to say, you know, but different soil, like suites of characteristics within those different regions or spaces?

STEVE BLECKER 13:05
What yeah, there’s, I mean, the big concern in Colorado, is water, I mean, we’re a pretty dry state. And anything you can do to improve the water holding capacity of the soil, I mean, that generally will help the soil health, but also help the plant productivity. So I mean, you can just go out into a field and dig up the surface of soil and, you know, you can see how well it’s aggregated, you know, what kind of pore space can the water move freely down into the soil kind of. So it can be stored in how much organic matter, you’ll always hear, can’t get away from soil health without talking about organic matter in our soil carbon, because it’s just, it’s so key to so many different properties. One of which, of course, is its ability to hold water. So if you I mean, if you go out in the field and look side by side, you can just pull out a cloud of soil and, you know, see how well it’s aggregated. Versus in I’ve seen people like the NRCS, they’ll take a chunk of soil that’s healthy, and put it in like a big, clear cylinder and let it sit there. And if it’s, you know, the healthier soil kind of stays together, the aggregates hold together, whereas a soil that’s, you know, quote, unquote, less healthy, tends to, you know, kind of break apart and fall apart much quicker. So that’s there’s a lot of visual cues, you can look at.

BRAD NEWBOLD 14:26
How, I guess, what are some are there some general principles, I guess, for land managers to think about when it comes to just overall improving their soil health? I mean, what if there were just key steps or? Yeah, just kind of a basic outline for how to improve your soil health. What would those look like?

JIM IPPOLITO 14:54
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think having a PhD I often use the term it depends. Because it really depends on where you’re located. So I think about the projects that we have where we’re using METER Group equipment, we were using them dominating the Western United States, specifically Colorado, and then in other surrounding states, but mainly Colorado, and we’re talking about the Western US. So in Colorado, for example, a basic outline would be, like Steve just mentioned, focusing first on carbon. And anything that you can do to improve organic carbon content in the soils of Colorado, for example, you’re gonna win the battle, and you likely will see an improvement in soil health. And, and there’s a reason behind this because the soils in Colorado are naturally low in organic carbon content. And they’ve become lower over time because of historical agricultural practices. So anything we can do to increase organic carbon in the soils that are relatively fragile, that typically have less than probably three and a half percent organic carbon or organic matter to begin with, is a bonus in the western United States. And that leads to what Steve mentioned, increases in water holding capacity aggregate stability, carbon is a food source for micro organisms that enhance nutrient cycling and turnover, which enhances the chemistry of soils. And it’s all linked together. And, and if you looked at those three circles, biology, chemistry, and physical aspects, the sweet spot where those three overlap is carbon, it’s really carbon in the center. That’s how I look at it. I’m not a carbon chemist, definitely not a carbon chemist, but we measure carbon, and we’ve measured carbon in our soils for decades. Now, Steve, and I have done this for 30 or 30 plus years together, yeah, because this ties in with what we’re doing with the equipment. And so you know, in the western US, we’re drought prone. And so anything we can do to increase water holding capacity of our soils, is a benefit. So in terms of soil health, or looking for systems that producers manage, that get a little bit more bang for the buck in terms of carbon storage, and subsequently utilizing METER Group equipment, to take a look at the changes in moisture holding capacity over time. And one of the things that’s just really, it just stands out to me is when you look at the soil health research has been done across the US. And if you look at the areas of the US where METER Group equipment is located, there is a big hole, and it’s almost hovered over Colorado. So that’s what we’re trying to do with our projects is to fill that gap.

BRAD NEWBOLD 17:54
Awesome. We’re glad to help out with that as well. So no, I think definitely, definitely, I think that that is one thing and because we see this in in lots of different in varied applications, whether you’re talking about soil moisture, or other soil characteristics, but also, we have that with, you know, with weather monitoring, or whatever sorts of systems, we have a lot of these these regional Mezonets that are going up throughout the United States and elsewhere. And by creating we’ve we’ve also had people on our podcast talking about Yeah, creating networks of soil moisture, data and so moisture, water potential, so yeah, soil water potential, those kinds of matrix potential, that kind of stuff. So definitely got being able to, to connect, we want to be able to know what’s going on in the here and now. But also, there’s, there’s this added, imperative, you know, this, this added, I guess, urgency to also be able to predict what’s, or forecast, what’s going to be happening in the next, you know, 5-10-50 years down the road as well. And if we don’t have that good data right now to work with, then then we’re, you know, just kind of shooting in the dark type of thing. So, let’s…

STEVE BLECKER 19:20
One thing we’re kind of, I mean, we’re kind of looking into because we have, we have METER sensors scattered over pretty large chunk of the state in all kinds of different agroecosystems, irrigated non irrigated range land. So that, you know, it got us thinking what I mean, there’s, initially the idea is to, you know, let the producer understand, like, what his practices are doing to soil moisture. But also at the same time, we have, as you mentioned, I mean, we were kind of just inadvertently, I guess, building this network of soil moisture monitoring stations across the state that yeah, so that might be able to help us answer You know, some of these questions about, you know, how the different systems respond to drought and so

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:04
Right, right. And I want to come back to this to in particular, in talking with you’re talking with you about, about your, your main research project, because there’s a lot that we want to know and understand about, about the instrumentation, but also about just the the challenges in creating, like you said, inadvertently, or on purpose, creating these networks, and, and being able to say, okay, what are the challenges in having, you know, all sorts of instrumentation just all over the place, about, you know, installation, and, and, and connecting them all. And not to mention, you know, collecting the data, as well as analyzing it. And we’re dealing with, you know, getting into big data issues, and all that kind of stuff. And so, so there’s a lot of a lot of interesting questions that we can talk about here in a second with that. I want to let’s, let’s switch gears, and we did have some folks here that wanted to know more about, they’re in Colorado, the STAR program. They’re in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture, they’re in Colorado, can you tell us a little bit about that program and what it’s all about?

STEVE BLECKER 21:30
Steve’s gonna pawn it off on me. Okay. So the STAR program is something that was not initially created in Colorado, it initially began in Champaign County, Illinois, it stands for Saving Tomorrow’s Agricultural Resources program. And in Illinois, it was geared around water quality. So programs, ie management of different parcels of land to help improve water quality that’s moving off site from a parcel of land. We took that concept. And oh, my gosh, probably about three or four years ago, in Colorado, we created with the help of a lot of people, the STAR program that’s centered around soil health, not water quality. Again, it still stands for Saving Tomorrow’s Agricultural Resources, but it’s based on essentially the backbone of the five principles of soil health at the NRCS promotes. And so I can’t remember all of them. I’m drawing a blank here, but you know, it’s soil cover living roots, introduction of livestock. There’s two others, I should know these off top my head, I’ve done this for so long, and probably just blanket I’m blanking. But the the five principles of soil health that the NRCS promotes. And then what we’ve done is we’ve created in Colorado, a set of STAR field forms that are housed on the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s STAR website. And these field forms were developed hand in hand with producers in different sectors of of ag within the state of Colorado. And so we went through, I don’t know how many iterations of these field forms hand in hand with producers to come up with a scoring system. So producers will if they’re growing corn, for example, in the state of Colorado, they can feel fill out a field form that’s geared towards corn, they’re asked a number of different questions and the questions are scored. And then the scores are accumulated. And they fall into one of five categories. So they and they receive a STAR placard. And the STAR placard that goes into their field or on their fence is either 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 stars. One star is the producer is doing the average as to what everybody else is doing in terms of focusing on soil health within that type of agroecosystem, and five is your, you’ve maxed out all the soil health principles that the NRCS promotes. Getting a five star is really, really difficult. Getting a one star is really, really easy. And we’ve set this up hand in hand with the producers to do this on purpose because not everybody should get a five star if they’re only doing a three star work in their field. And so this is this is what we’ve developed and we have I think 11 different field forms for all sorts of different types of crops and it might even go into we didn’t create a we didn’t create a field for for rangelands, did we Steve?

Other grazing lands? Yeah. It covers rangelands,

But it’s an it’s completely voluntary. almost completely voluntary. Alright, so there’s part of it. That’s voluntary. If a producer wants to become part of the STAR program, they can. And we also have something called Star Plus. And this is, and this is the incentive based program from what I remember. So, correct, yeah, so other producers who, if they’re lucky enough to get into the STAR Plus program, there are certain additional requirements that they need to meet, in order to get an incentive payment from the Colorado Department of Agriculture. It’s but the premise is still the same, they fill out a STAR form, they get a rating. And then what we’re trying to do in our programs, is to look at these different management practices or tweak these management practices to increase the STAR rating from say, a one to a two, or maybe a three to a four on a particular parcel of land. Did I miss anything? I

I mean, basically, no that covers it pretty well, I mean, basically, the idea is to just go out and interact with these producers and just have a conversation about soil health, and try to get them to, you know, they need to try out, they need to commit to trying out one of these, one of the five principles of soil health, just implement a new practice that they haven’t tried before, on other portion of their field, a whole new field, and then just see what happens. You know, and that’s what we’re, that’s what we’ve kind of started in the past couple years, we’re kind of at the, the leading edge of, of the star plus projects. So we don’t really have any revenue data coming in yet. But that’s been interesting just to go out there and interact with all these different folks and all these different agroecosystems.

Yeah, the you know, one of the most exciting portions of this project are that it’s not one project. It’s multiple projects that use the STAR program. But I think one of the most exciting things is one working hand in hand with producers to come up with a rating system, two these placards that will go out into fields. And our programs are supposedly touching about 500 producers across the state. So it’s not inconsequential. And so each producer will have a placard that should be visible along some road that they live near the where the field is located, to hopefully generate discussion and interest among other producers, because we all know producers go down to the local coffee shop, and, and chit chat, right. I mean, they do more than chitchat, they talk about what they see and this, this, hopefully will generate some interest to get more people involved in the program. And the last thing I want to mention to you, which is part of our climate smart commodities project is we’re hoping that this STAR rating system will eventually end up as a market signal. So if you’re a producer, with a five star rating, you might get a little bit extra, when you sell your commodity on the market. We’re really hoping that this is what this leads to.

BRAD NEWBOLD 27:52
Yeah, I was I mean, that’s good to hear that it’s one of my my biggest questions with that was the adoption, you know, producers and growers are notoriously slow at at adopting new technology, new practices, or at least that’s the, that’s the the traditional view of how things go. They’re there some early adopters, and here and there, but it’s because it’s such a, you know, risk reward practice when it comes to agriculture, is that if they do see that things are working out towards their benefit, then at least from what from what we’ve seen here, then you can really start to see that shift in, in best practices, from a potential, you know, from traditional practices that have been going on for, you know, a century or two, to or even or even more, to those where where we have kind of either new technology, new ideas, or new innovations in land management. And so that’s really good to see. I was I was interested in that incentive, like how much of an incentive does it take to to generate this, you know, to generate buzz or to generate adoption, but it sounds like it’s, it’s going pretty well there, at least in Colorado. Along with that and both of you, Steve, you talked about going out and you know, visiting face to face with with these growers with producers, and communicating the this this program or the benefits to adopting this program or any other or even if it deals with just soil health in general or other practices. This is one of these questions that kind of pops up with a lot of our guests is Have you have you felt that there’s there are practices or techniques that you’ve used that you found successful in communicating? I guess kind of in translating scientific research to the layperson or to in your instance With with growers and producers, is there because a lot of times within this, you know, scientific community within academia, again, we’re using jargon, we’re going back and forth, we’re, you know, publishing white papers and peer reviewed journals, that really doesn’t percolate down to the general audience. And especially in this case where the general audience, those growers and producers are the ones who would benefit most from the research that you’re doing. So, to back this back up again, have you found any? Or what are the points of success that you’ve seen in being able to communicate your research to, to a lay audience?

STEVE BLECKER 30:37
Let me give this a shot first, and because I had an extension appointment at Colorado State University, and it was pretty large. And so I, part of my job was to talk to producers, often outside of the projects that Steve and I and others have going on. But so thinking about in the context of soil health, I remember one of the first talks I gave to producers that a producer conference, oh, my gosh, probably December 2016. And I got a lot of eye rolls, when I was talking about soil health, because a lot of the there was probably over 100 producers in this room out in Fort Morgan, Colorado, lots of eye rolls. So I realized quickly that there had to be a better way to get the point across that soil health is important. And so coming back to the point I made at the beginning of the podcast about human health, people really can understand human health. And maybe they can’t wrap their heads around soil health. But when you make that analogy, and that comparison, it is very simple for people to see where we’re coming from in terms of soil health, and that’s worked really, really well for me for the last probably four years. I dont know have you run into those issues, Steve?

I generally, we, I kind of take this a little different direction. We rely heavily on our CSU Extension program in the state. And they tend to have experts, agronomy type experts in different parts of the state that have experience in different agroecosystems. And these are folks that have developed relationships with producers in the area. So they trust you know, they’ve built up this level of trust with the producers. So we we rely on them to kind of also help get out the message between them in our we haven’t Well, I worked for the Ag Experiment Station. So I have about eight Ag Experiment Station set up across the state where they have field days, and we can bring in producers and to kind of explain the research and they can see firsthand Hey, you know, we tried this different tillage method. This is what happened. And so that’s kind of, so I rely mostly on all these other people in the field.

BRAD NEWBOLD 32:57
Let’s talk about you mentioned agroecosystems. And so let’s get into kind of the, the meat of the conversation here. You have this large federally funded grants project here in dealing with agro ecosystem management practices and improvements to that and how it connects to soil health and Ecosystem Sustainability resiliency. Can you give us a little background on to this this project and how it came to be and, and just kind of Yeah, introduce us to, to what you’re hoping to do here?

JIM IPPOLITO 33:33
Yeah. We got lucky! I can tell you, there’s there’s more than just luck involved. But when we started in Colorado, this soil health push, really the push the most recent push started in 2019, July 2019. And there was a lot of people interested in soil health, and that got whittled down to a number of different subsets. And the subset that Steve and I run in, we have a core group of people myself, Steve, Dr. Megan mock molar. We have two people from a consulting company called groundup consulting. That’s Max Neumayer. And, and Helen silver. And then we have a couple of postdocs, we have at least one postdoc, but the core that I just mentioned, we work really, really well together. And some people in our group have strengths and weaknesses just like everybody else. I think we have a pretty good handle on who has strengths and who has weaknesses in different sectors. And when I think about being successful, Steve and I, and and Megan, Mark Miller, we have the science down. No, no doubt about it. We’re really good at what we do in terms of science. I don’t want to sound like, arrogant or anything, but we’re, we’ve done this for a long time. So I think we’re really good at what we do. One of the things I think scientists sometimes struggle with is being creative in terms of writing, right? I mean, it just happened. So we have Max and Helen that are creative wizards. And they can put together a proposal that is just really good looking. And we’ve been very successful. So we do the science, we write the science, and then they write the, the other portion that makes it look sexy, to be honest with you. And we have been so successful, I think we’re running off of a total of 30 million, 34 million? I can’t remember, I’ve lost track of the number. We have this climate smart commodities grant that totals something like 25 million. It’s not all coming to Colorado State University, because it’s split among different entities. But it’s 25 million. And we had another one federal Conservation Innovation Grant, that was I think, 3.4 million, and then a few others, and they’ve built upon one another to the point where we’ve landed this climate smart commodities grant. And we’re looking to the future to keep doing what we’re doing now just on, you know, either in Colorado or outside of Colorado.

BRAD NEWBOLD 36:20
And I want to I want to come back to that, because one of the questions I wanted to ask, is it when you’re talking about funding, because I mean, it’s, you know, it’s kind of, you know, do or die when it comes to grant writing and looking for funding and all those kinds of things. And, and so one of the questions was that, that maybe we can come back to her, you can answer it now. And we can splice it in later. But, but what what makes these kinds of large projects attractive for funding? So you talked about you have, you know, you wrote it the science, you had somebody, you know, some some folks make it sound sexy, and those kinds of things, what are what are some of the things that you felt were key to, to, to attracting funding from, from these these, you know, government programs or, or funding agencies?

STEVE BLECKER 37:10
Well, I think the key for this climate smart commodities Grant was the fact that we’ve built this program, from the ground up hand in hand with producers, and we’ve been lucky to score or land or receive relatively smaller grants that have led to bigger grants that have led to this climate smart commodities grant. So you know, being successful in grant development, and grant receiving is building a program. And we’ve been lucky enough to build this program. And so you write a grant, like the climate smart commodities grant, and you can put data into that grant that you have from previous grants that are focused on identical topics. And we so we, to be successful, we’ve been really focused, like our group has been completely focused on soil health. And when you build out something this large, you have to bring other people on board. And I’m a scientist, Steve’s a scientist, I won’t speak for him. But we’ve brought in sociologist, to take a look at how this star program will develop and unfold on a socio-scale or socio economic scale. And I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that. So we have sociologists and economists that are going to do that for us. And so that just makes this project this much bigger,

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:23
Got it, so let’s let’s get into let’s yeah, dive into the weeds. What are what are the main, you know, problems or questions that you’re you’re looking to, to answer or dig into when it comes to the project here?

STEVE BLECKER 38:38
Well, there’s a there’s a project I’m working on, it’s kind of it’s outside of these STAR programs. But it’s it’s soil health, because that’s what we do around here, apparently. But yeah, we’re looking at this project. We’re looking at degraded range lands in southeastern Colorado. In just different conditions where they’ve been overgrazed in the past. And there’s also there’s a trend, I won’t go into a lot of detail, but the municipalities, I mean, water as water becomes more and more scarce and more expensive. There’s lands that are bought up that used to be irrigated, but then they’re just allowed to kind of return returned to a dryland state, because they the cities want to use the water for something else like municipalities. So then, you know, you’re left with a task of so what did we do to these lands that are no longer being irrigated? You know, how do we kind of improve them? You know, do we incorporate grazing or what kind of amendments can we add? So it’s been a it’s been an interesting challenge, but we’ve been going out working with these ranchers, it’s been kind of a almost a bottom up approach. It’s like go out to them and say, Hey, show me some fields that you’re having problems with, you know, we’ll kind of talk about why and then we, we’ve set up some plots on some of these kind of degraded or, for lack of a better There were areas, and we’re just trying some different techniques to see, you know, if we can improve the productivity of the range land. Further, these are all, you know, grazed cattle graze lands.

Let me, let me add something about our our bigger picture across the state of Colorado. So what we’re trying to do, and this is complicated, because I can’t give you a really good answer as to what we’re going to find, I guess that’s the premise behind the sciences, you know, it’s exciting that it’s new. And so what we’re trying to do is look at across the state of Colorado, and adjacent states, what management practices work, and which ones don’t, in terms of improving soil health, and concomitant concomitantly improving soil water, or available soil water. So these two go hand in hand, that’s really what we’re doing, you know, to be honest with you, if you’re gonna take up like a 30,000 foot view, look on the projects that we’re running, it’s really all about water, especially in the Western US. And soil health is just tagging along for the ride, to be honest with you. But we are looking at trying to improve soils, so they’re resilient and sustainable, and can hold on to water for a longer period of time and supply water to crops. And so we’re trying to find sweet spots in terms of management practices across the state. And so the idea is, this is just an idea, not sure if this is how this is going to work out or not. But we break the state down into different types of cropping systems or agroecosystems, or we break the state down into different eco-regions, or we break the state down into some other type of format that makes sense. So we can piece this soil health, water health or water quality or water quantity, puzzle together to help producers across the state of Colorado, and I don’t know how it’s going to flush out but it’s going to flush out one way or the other.

I was just gonna say, no matter how we end up breaking it out. I mean, the big, the big hurdle is always variability. Because there’d be there’s variability in soils, even within these different practices, their variability, I mean, like, if people use different kind of cover crops, there’s different kinds of tillage practices, even on a conservation tillage side of things. So that’s why we’re trying to, you know, that’s always going to be a struggle, but we’re trying to try to get hundreds of growers involved in this. So we can at least maybe kind of get slightly, you know, kind of clear things up a little bit, maybe in some of these different systems.

BRAD NEWBOLD 42:36
Right, right. So what are some of the, I guess? What are some of the parameters then that you are looking at? And and how are you? How are you getting at them? How are you measuring and quantifying those?

STEVE BLECKER 42:51
Well, we’re, we’re certainly casting a large net. And that’s the beauty of doing research is, you know, if you have the funding, you can cast a large net. And so we’re doing this on purpose, because we want to collect more data then not enough data. And so right, if you’re in the sciences field, like Steve and I have been in for over 30 years, you always, invariably look over your shoulder and say, “I should have I should have collected this, I should have collected that”. So with these projects, I I feel like we haven’t, we won’t do that we won’t look over our shoulder and say we should have done this because we’re doing it. And we’re collecting a lot of data. With the hopes to widdle the data set down to something manageable for producers in the state of Colorado. We’re collecting soil physical characteristics, biological characteristics, chemical characteristics, nutrient characteristics we’re collecting. Sooner or later, we’re going to be collecting some microbiome characteristics, which are a little bit outside of against both of our expertise. But we have other people that will be doing this for us to put a puzzle together that makes sense, across however, we break this out across the state.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:03
So say for instance, if you’re if you’re dealing you’re you’re measuring all the various soil characteristics, let’s break that down. What are what are some of the those characteristics that you’re measuring? How are you measuring those?

STEVE BLECKER 44:14
Yeah, well, there’s things like aggregate stability, I mean, you can you take a soil sample and all the stuff you take back to the lab, right, and you’re doing some sort of extraction, but like what aggregate stability, there’s a, in a civil engineering department build a device that Jim uses in his lab to basically it just kind of agitates the sample over time and you see how well it holds together. And yeah, there’s different extracts to pull out you know, like what kind of nutrients are available to plants, nitrogen, phosphorus, all the major nutrients like that, it might end micronutrient micronutrients as well.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:50
Right.

STEVE BLECKER 44:52
Yeah, on the, you know, in addition to water, aggregate or wet aggregate stability, we measure bulk density So actually collect a sample that’s separate from all the other samples we collect in the field to measure how dense or how dense the soil is, I guess it’s the bulk density. We collect soils for in terms of biological, we’re looking at currently, well organic carbon is at the center. And then we look at microbial biomass carbon, we look at something called beta glucose oxidase activity, which is a measurement. It’s an enzyme assay for how easily micro organisms can degrade cellulosic material and soil. So like some of the basics are relatively easy materials to decompose. We look at something called and Steve alluded to this, we look at potentially mineralized double nitrogen. So how much nitrogen is present in an organic form that can be mineralized over a certain period of time? Yeah, and we’ve looked at other assays in the past some enzyme assays but where I think we’re at least the climate smart commodities, we might be doing some microbiome type assays where we’re looking at structure and function of microorganisms within systems. And then, of course, we’re looking at pH and electrical conductivity. And like Steve mentioned, nutrient concentrations, both macro and micronutrients. And there’s there’s probably some other things Oh, water holding capacity in the lab on like, pressure plates. We’re supposedly doing that as well. It, it’s a big list. Yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:31
Yeah. So So with that, with that big list? I mean, what then are you’ve talked about dealing with collecting, collecting a bunch of data, you’ve talked about, you know, the spatial variability or variability with you know, land use? Are are there any, I guess, what would you consider your your biggest hurdle in, in putting out this large amount of of instrumentation or collecting all this, this this data here? Is it? Is it is it the time is it? Is it just the I mean, you’ve you’ve, you’ve got the funding now. So you can, you can purchase the equipment, you can pay for that time, but are there are there other things that that you see, that you have seen or foresee as as major hurdles. In collecting all of this data?

STEVE BLECKER 47:18
The soil moisture monitoring, in these agroecosystems, you got to deal with, these aren’t like, like some are like a forest right, we can just put these in the ground and walk away. There’s, these are actively, you know, managed fields that are being tilled, and all these other practices. So when we started out, we were putting these systems like right in the middle of the field, because, you know, we wanted to get like the best representative spot we could find. But you know, then they get knocked over and damaged. And we’d have to pull them back out, depending on whether they were harvesting or tilling. And that was only with like, 10 or 12 sites. But now that we’ve got network, we’re ramping this up with dozens and dozens of sites, we tried to, we really had to think about a different way to do this. So we just were working with METER to kind of, I mean, basically, we just extended the cables. So we can put the logger in at the edge of the field and then run the cable in. And then we work with the grower to try to find a depth. We usually put them in at six inches, but we try to find a depth that we can leave them in, right, hopefully for the duration of the project for three or four years. Because it’s just we just logistically it’s just too hard to run back and forth. Installing and uninstalling. So yes, yeah, it’s been challenging.

BRAD NEWBOLD 48:31
Yeah.

STEVE BLECKER 48:32
And Colorado is such a big state that if you have a site like we do, we’re going to be installing these at locations that are eight hours from Fort Collins. So if something goes sideways, to jump in a car and drive eight hours to splice a cable together, and then drive eight hours back is a real challenge. So yeah, Steve’s taking the lead on this. Well, and it’s been great because we bought a trencher to to help with the installments. Because if we have 500 of these devices to put out. Yeah, unless you want like really big forearms like Popeye or something. I mean, trenchers are really handy. I think, you know, I’m a lab rat mostly. And I think about the bottleneck on that side is just Hance having people. So the climate smart commodities grant when it starts rolling, some sometime next year, we’re going to have about 300, almost 400 soil samples come back into the lab. And all that analysis needs to be done and I can tell you from experience that that will take at least a year to get done with the people that we have, so we need to hire more people. And I know our space is limited, so we need more space. So fun.

BRAD NEWBOLD 49:53
So So what are the I mean we can talk about any preliminary results that you But, but what are the primary hypotheses that you’re testing? Or do? I guess? What your, your expectations with with connecting, like you said, connecting these, you know agroecosystem management practices to soil health and Ecosystem Sustainability resiliency?

JIM IPPOLITO 50:24
Yeah, that’s a good question I picked up on the word hypothesis. And so this, this is a tough one to crack because, you know, it’s a general hypothesis. But if a producer is following one of the, or all of the five principles of soil health, the hypothesis would be that soil health would increase in a system, right? And that’s a cheesy answer. But that’s, that’s the answer I can give you. Because the way we’ve set this, this whole project up, and the STAR program in Colorado, is to allow the producer to make the decision on what they want to change in terms of management. So it’s flipping the research upside down, to be honest with you, you know, as researchers, we come up with the ideas and hypotheses and then we, we set up the project and test them, but we’re not doing that in this project, the farmers, they’re installing the new management practice, and then we just, we kind of go with it. So in some respects, we’re flying a little bit without a hypothesis.

BRAD NEWBOLD 51:28
Kind of exploratory research.

STEVE BLECKER 51:31
Yeah. And things like I mean, we’re always trying to improve or increase organic matter in the soil. But that can take a while. Yeah, it can, you know, it can exceed the life of a grant. So it’s kind of so you might not see the, you know, these changes within three years, right, just you know, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to but, so that makes it kind of challenging.

JIM IPPOLITO 51:53
You know, one of the nice things about the climates where commodities grant is, I think we could potentially eke out five years with us. And so from my experience, having worked in Colorado for a really long period of time, you know, these are the places where if you’re going to see a change in carbon, you’re going to see a change in carbon in the western US if you do something positive. And that’s because our carbon content is organic carbon content is so low to begin with. So if you make an incremental change, it could be huge to be honest with you, you know, if you go from 1.5 to 2%, that’s, that’s huge, it’s only half a percent change. But if you do that, in a system that has low carbon to begin with, like in Colorado, you’re going to see more of an improvement than if you went for a half percent change in carbon content in a soil in Minnesota, that already starts with seven and a half percent carbon. So this is where I, my gut is telling me that this is where we’re going to see the best bang for our buck, in terms of return on investment, for improving carbon in our soils, it’s going to be in the Western United States, we’re going to see drastic improvements. And I’ll tell you from some of my experiences with other soil health projects, that if you do things, quote, right, you might see a change in less than five years. In fact, we had a project over on the western slope of Colorado, where we saw changes in three years in terms of organic carbon accumulation in the soil surface in three years.

BRAD NEWBOLD 53:21
Have you have you had any, any issues or challenges in in collaborating with with, I guess, again, the the idea of the collaboration between growers and academics? Within this this project itself? We talked about communication with with them, are you is this is this something? Well, let me back this up. Are, are these when you’re going out? Are and installing or measuring? The assumption is that you’re working with growers and not just on experimental fields is Is that Is that correct?

STEVE BLECKER 53:55
Yeah, we have, most of these are, these are their fields. Yeah, used to grow, what they’re grown. And we, and we utilize, we didn’t really bring up the we have a series of conservation districts throughout the state of Colorado, and, and other entities like that. But it’s kind of up to them, and they apply to the Department of Ag and say, Hey, we want to, we think we can bring on 10 producers or our conservation district. So then, so we rely on these guys to you know, who already have these relationships with the growers built this trust. So I mean, it makes a big difference. And they, you know, again, the producers don’t have to, it’s all voluntary, so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 54:36
Right, right. And, Jim, you talked about the, you know, you know, potentially increasing carbon by, you know, there in the in, in the semi arid west by, you know, half a percent would be huge, but do you see other other potential impacts of, of projects like these, this project or projects like these on on agriculture, and I guess Have the implications for, for Colorado, the region and maybe potentially the world at large?

JIM IPPOLITO 55:07
Well, I do and I, when you ask a question like that, I come immediately back to the STAR program. And so I recently moved from Colorado State University to Ohio State University. And I’m trying to instill the STAR program within some proposals that we’re writing currently to expand this idea of using star to quantify soil health, not only in Colorado, but then, of course, the western US with this climate smart commodities grant, but bringing that concept to the Midwest. And so there’s, there’s some real opportunities. And we, in Colorado did a, I think, a really good job developing that program, to the point where, you know, can’t I don’t think be lifted directly out of Colorado. But you could take that and then tweak the content in the STAR program to a particular state or region across the United States, and probably the globe, to be honest with you. That’s, I think that’s the benefit of what we’ve done in the state of Colorado.

STEVE BLECKER 56:10
And I would just add that, I mean, the one thing we haven’t talked about is erosion. I mean, all these practices help keep the soil in place, and can have soil health without soil. So keeping litter on the surface, if you’re, you know, all these different practices, cover crops, having that living root in there, just kind of anchoring the soil, keeping it around things that, you know, didn’t happen back in the dustbowl days.

BRAD NEWBOLD 56:32
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. So looking at let’s see, Jim, you said you might be able to stretch this out to five years, a five year project, but looking looking there at the end, or even, I guess, looking into the future, what do you see as the future of this research? What do you see? You’ve talked about expanding, growing, expanding projects and building project upon project? And what do you see as the future of of this research project as it moves forward?

JIM IPPOLITO 57:00
Yeah, that’s a great question. So the climate smart commodities project is really mostly Colorado centric. But it also encompasses five states that abut the Rocky Mountain backbone. So New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, all the land grant institutions within those five states and Colorado State University, are working on this project. So the concept is, we’ve built we’ve built a really strong program focused on soil health in the STAR program in Colorado. And we want to send feelers out to these adjacent states to see if something like this would work in those states. And to be honest with you, Max Neumayer, and Helen silver, have already held discussions with the state of Wyoming. And they’re putting they’re putting together a soil health program, much like in Colorado, and they’ve reached out to other states, I know they’re working in the state of Washington to do the same thing. And the state of Washington is on the periphery of the climate smart commodities project. But the the concept is, is to not make this Colorado centric, but make it Western centric, and then make it nation centric. So we actually have help, we, there’s people that are working on this at the STAR, center location, or whatever you would call it in Illinois, to make this a reality across the US. That’s what I’d like to see. That would be really cool.

BRAD NEWBOLD 58:28
Steve, any thoughts on the future of this kind of research?

STEVE BLECKER 58:34
Other than just I mean, the more we can make this data available to the producers, and show them that, hey, it really works, you know, and hopefully, not only does it work, but hopefully they’ll be seeing increases in yield as their soil health improves, because I mean, that’s the bottom line. I mean, they’re not gonna mean they’re not growing soil, they’re growing crops, right. But, of course, you need good soil to get a good crop. So hopefully, this this will go hand in hand, as they improve the soil, they’ll see yields increasing, and they won’t just, you know, try it on one field, you know, adopt it over larger portions of their operation.

BRAD NEWBOLD 59:11
Right.

JIM IPPOLITO 59:12
I’ll just add to this. So, the dream, this is probably pretty crazy. That’s a crazy statement coming from somebody who writes proposals to bring in research dollars to do work. But the dream would be to not have to work on soil health ever again. And that may sound crazy. But imagine if you could develop a program that just fine tuned every single system to number or a short set of indicators that we know tell you the story of soil health, or if you could use the star forms that this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to match up the STAR forms data to the data we collect in the laboratory. And imagine if you could take just a form that producer fills out, that would tell you what the health of the soil is without having to do the work in the lab. To me, that is really what I’d like to see happen. So people like myself and Steve and others, we can start focusing on other topics of importance. And keep this simple. If there could be a simple there probably is not a simple but that’s the dream. Right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:00:27
Right. Well, any other final thoughts or other things that you’d like to share with our audience about what we’ve talked about or beyond what we’ve talked about here?

JIM IPPOLITO 1:00:39
I’ll tell you, we’re, we’re working. And this is outside of the climate smart commodities. But you know, Steve mentioned his work in range lands, these degraded range lands. And so we actually have a soil health program where we’re looking at using soil health principles and practices and quantification in mind land reclamation, which is really fun, because those systems are really they’re like, these degraded range lands that Steve’s working on, they’re just very wacky, you know, they may be contaminated with heavy metals beyond the point where plants can grow. And so looking at practices to improve these to grow something to reduce erosion, like Steve mentioned, and to improve soil health and Plant Health, and hopefully animal health, because bracing, you know, grazing animals come through these areas, and ultimately, environmental health. So it’s like a One Health concept, if you will. This is what we do.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:01:32
Yeah, I think we’re out of time. But maybe we’ll have you back to talk more about Yeah, range lands and reclaimed mining and biogeochemical cycling and forever chemicals and all that kind of stuff. So anyway, those are fun things for for potential future episodes. We’ll see. All right. I think that’s it. Our time’s up for today. Thanks again, Steve. And, Jim, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. And it’s been a great conversation. So thanks again. Stay safe, and we’ll see you next time on We Measure the World!

 

Transcript:

 

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello everybody and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists for scientists…

DARREN FICKLIN 0:07
Yeah. So if you’re not familiar with Brood X Cicadas they come out of the ground every 17 years, and these are not, these are not flies. These are several inches in length and a half an inch. So they come out every 17 years, and essentially what happens is when they come out, they leave these gigantic holes in the ground about the size of a dime. And these burrows go about, they can go up to 60 centimeters deep. So they can go relatively deep. So they emerge from the soil. They make their way up the tree, they’ll mate on the tree. And then the larvae or nymphs will fall to the ground, dig into the soil, and they stay there for 17 years. So the research question was essentially, how does this how do these burros affect infiltration?

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:57
That’s a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continuum. Today’s guest is Darren Ficklin. Darren Ficklin is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Indiana University. He received his bachelor’s in geological sciences there at Indiana University and then went on to get his master’s in geology at Southern Illinois University and a PhD in hydrologic Sciences at the University of California Davis. After completing his PhD, he stayed in California and did postdoctoral work at Santa Clara University. His current research focuses primarily on the intersection of hydrology and climate. And today he’s here to talk about his many research projects into watershed and soil hydrology, climate change, and bugs. So Darren, thanks so much for being here.

DARREN FICKLIN 1:52
Thank you for having me.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:55
All right. So yeah, today, we wanted to talk about a few of your projects and research interests. But first, can you tell us a little bit about your background? And, and then how you became involved in hydrology?

DARREN FICKLIN 2:06
Yeah, that’s a good question. So I’m, I’m from Indiana, Originally, I’m from about an hour south and I grew up in farmland. And I’ve always been interested in science. I have no idea why, some of these older, older folks listening may remember, Mr. Wizard, Bill Nye, I watched those all the time. I remember as a young kid, mixing mayonnaise, and ketchup and mustard and making my own chemical, chemical, chemical concentrations there and doing some weird stuff with that. But I’ve always been interested in science. I don’t know really what happened with that. And as I grew older, I got to kind of be in the environment more. And so my dad worked for the USDA NRCS as a soil scientist, specifically what he did is he helped farmers around the region, limit erosion. So that I think that kind of steered me in the direction of the environmental science. And that was, that was essentially I was too young to know what that was. But as I grew up, in high school, I kind of could understand of, you know, what you can do in the environment. I was also really into computers at at the high school, I didn’t understand them. In fact, I went to Indiana University, and I was originally a computer science major. And they threw me into a sophomore level course. And I had no idea what I was doing almost immediately. So that was, they threw me in and they were coding on the first day. So I did not understand what computer science was at that age. So I dropped that almost immediately. I talked to the advisor, one of the academic advisors at IU, and they they kind of steered me into this intro introductory geology course. And that was it, that basically, I took off from there, I really, really enjoyed it. And then as I took more and more classes, I took more hydrology classes in the upper levels. And that’s really when when I took off as far as I was interested in hydrology, and I think a lot of that stemmed from my, you know, farming background and my dad’s work with the USDA.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:15
So, I guess that’s kind of fun. This is one of the things that we hear often is that either Yeah, the the folks that are now in their specialties they are quite often didn’t start where where they thought or didn’t end up where they thought they would end up starting with one thing moving on to another. So going from computer science. So then did with your computer science background, and then geology. So I’m assuming that that GIS then became kind of one of your one of your go twos to connect the two.

DARREN FICKLIN 4:46
Yeah, so at undergraduate I started taking a lot of GIS courses as well. That was junior senior level courses, and specifically they were geological applications in GIS, where you would work on I work on my own erosion processes on a hillslope. That type of stuff really, you know, really kind of kind of gelled everything together. For me the computer science aspect. Yeah, I didn’t understand that computer science was coding. At that time, I learned very quickly. I mean, now I can code but I didn’t didn’t understand it when I was entering the undergraduate curriculum.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:20
Right. Well, let’s talk, let’s dive into some of your current research and or more recent research. A lot of a lot of what you’ve been working with, especially within the realm of hydrology is hydrology and Hydroclimatology. And and those kinds of they interplay between between climate change and variability and hydrological processes. Can you get, I guess, how did how did you go from from being, you know, working with? Let me back that up. So how did you come to focus more on on this, this, I guess, this interplay, the integration between climate and hydrology?

DARREN FICKLIN 6:03
Yeah, so my master’s was in groundwater, groundwater hydrology, my PhD was in surface hydrology. So a lot of those are treated separately, they should not be treated separately, but a lot of them are treated separately. So that kind of gives me a little more general idea of the hydrological cycle. And as far as climate change goes, that really started when I was out in California, getting my PhD and it really started. You don’t I don’t realize this and when you’re in the Midwest, but California exists because of its snowmelt snowpack. And I was really interested in how climate change was affecting those variables. So that’s kind of what initially got me going on that. And then I took that a little step further and kind of worked on the agricultural aspect of climate change, specifically looking at water quality. I was looking at nitrates pesticide runoff in the Central Valley of California. And then that kind of led me directly in to my postdoctoral work, which, which was mainly on stream temperature, largely due because of the important aquatic species out west salmon, trout, that depend on a particular particular stream temperature to exist.

BRAD NEWBOLD 7:13
I’m interested in definitely in the the issues around hydrology within the inner mountain and arid west. I mean, that’s that’s kind of a big deal now. And it has been for a while, you know, ever since ever since people started living there, you know, water is is a scarce resource, in those more arid environments, and especially like what you were talking about with being dependent on on snow melt on that snowpack, for for that runoff for recharge, for all those other things that we’re dealing with, what are some of the questions that you’re interested in? And maybe some of the things that you learned? And in researching, particularly with in dealing with with kind of those those more snow dependent regions?

DARREN FICKLIN 7:58
Well, would you add climate change to the mix? It’s not not pretty, right. So the snowpack barely exists, depending on what what climate change your projection you’re looking at and working on. The snowpack barely exist at the end of the century, right. And it’s largely due to air temperature, air temperature, precipitation falls that either snow is rain, right snow or rain. And when you have a higher temperature, it’s more likely to fall as as rain. And then you put that on an existing snowpack. That wipes it up pretty quickly. So So that’s we’ve done work in the Sierra, the Columbia and the Colorado, and they’re all basically telling you the exact same thing, you know, when you increase air temperature, and and even when when precipitation is held steady compared to historical rates, snowpack still goes down. Yeah, so that’s, that’s generally a conclusion. And that’s, that’s not a new conclusion. There have been plenty of people looking at that. And still looking at that, and specifically, how these dynamics are going to change and whether these models can capture these dynamics, and then the you add the whole reservoir management aspect of that, which I don’t do, but how are you going to manage no water or lack of water when when to release this water? For agricultural irrigation and environmental flows? It’s extremely complicated.

BRAD NEWBOLD 9:15
Right, and yeah, I mean, personally speaking, I’ve been interested in in the, the, I guess, the plight of the Great Salt Lake here in in the West, and that, specifically, when you’re talking about like, yeah, reservoir management or in dealing with snowpack. They’re in the in the Rockies. They’re nearby they had a bunch of snow. So to back this up the Great Salt Lake has been decreasing the the water level has been decreasing for for for years, for various reasons, climate change among them. But then also they’re having a they had a huge snowfall this winter, and expecting a huge snowpack, but then we’re dealing with As climate variability, so then you have a lot of snow, but then the next week, it’s, you know, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and you’re having all that snow that’s supposed to be getting packed down is melting, and then you’re dealing with floods and other things like that. And so then, you know, the lake level will rise for a little while, but, but again, that that idea, like you said, that long term of the hydrology of that region of that Basin region does not look very good right now.

DARREN FICKLIN 10:29
Yeah, I mean, I did my postdoctoral project. One of my projects during my postdoctoral work was on Mono Lake in the eastern Eastern Sierras. And the issue of of that is still snowpack as well, but the main issue was that LA went up and grabbed all of the water entering entering Mono Lake now there’s been some some laws to kind of, kind of move that back to a more reasonable allotments, but it’s still the same. It’s the same issue there. Where’s the snowpack feeds, the small creeks, enter Mono Lake and when they when you don’t have water, you expose the lake bed, which is salty and brine and lots of like, Salt Lake City has as well, right? Where you get these wind storms? And it just, yeah, asthma.

BRAD NEWBOLD 11:09
Yeah, yeah, it’s Yeah. windstorms. You have an inversion that then keeps all that that air pollution down all that kind of stuff as well. Yeah. And I mean, it’s it’s something that we’ve seen throughout throughout the world. I mean, yeah, especially there in California, Mono Lake Owens, Salton Sea. And then elsewhere, you have, you know, the Aral Sea, it’s probably that the most well known one worldwide, where you have that just decrease in and that inflow. And then just, yeah, everything kind of goes to pot after that. Yes. It’s tough to come back from that. And it’s one of those things where, where you’re changing. I don’t want to be, you know, Debbie Downer about this, but a lot of times change doesn’t happen until it’s right there in your face. And then and then oftentimes, it’s too late. So yeah, I don’t know.

DARREN FICKLIN 11:57
Yeah and it’s hard to tell farmers you can’t have that water. Yeah, so yeah, just Yeah. When they’ve had it for so long.

BRAD NEWBOLD 12:05
I think I think I remember hearing and, and I hope I’m correct on this, I don’t want to say anything, but but that, therefore the Great Salt Lake, the, I think about 80% of the water that comes off, is being pulled for agricultural use something along those lines as and 20%. For for other, you know, industrial or urban or residential use. Yeah. And so that’s, that is a difficult situation to find yourself in, is, especially as a farmer grower producer, where, you know, now I can’t do what I’ve been doing, or what my family has been doing for generations, because, you know, some outside, you know, outside sources telling me, you know, that I’m using too much water. I’ve got water rights, and I don’t want to go into all that stuff. But but it’s definitely something that here in the intermountain west, arid west, it’s it’s something that is of within the prioritize discussions, and yeah.

DARREN FICKLIN 13:05
Well, that’s not going away. I mean, I know California is doing a big groundwater management, groundwater recharge management, they’re putting a lot of money into that. So it’s there. There’s a lot of money out the West to understand these problems, and they’re not stopping.

BRAD NEWBOLD 13:22
Have you? Have you gotten into any any kind of involvement with with policymakers when it comes to water use or management practices?

DARREN FICKLIN 13:33
No, no, I haven’t. That’s something I would like to do. We have a great school on campus, School of Public Environmental Affairs. They do a lot of environmental policy. And I do have colleagues that work with with policymakers. But it’s something that I haven’t really reached out and done yet. It’s it’s something that’s needed absolutely.

BRAD NEWBOLD 13:52
You have a, I guess, recent or current projects on funded by the USGS on rain on snow events. And looking into those, what have you found with that was what was your primary questions going into to that project? And what have you been finding with with that?

DARREN FICKLIN 14:08
Yeah, so that projects I had a PhD student here at IU that graduate and is now at the Stroudwater center out on the East Coast. And he got the interest of looking at rain on snow, but not in the western United States to where rain on snow is is really studied. A lot are quite well. We’re looking at the Great Lakes, where there’s a lot of snow, a lot of snow in the Great Lakes, but rain on snow isn’t really looked at there. And we know that rain on snow causes flooding up in the Great Lakes. It happens. It happens frequently. So we’re kind of taking what we’ve learned what we’ve done with western United States and moved it up to the Great Lakes Basin which needs some studying as well. And the main questions was essentially what’s rain on snow doing in the future? And then what we’re working on right now is what’s rain on snow doing to water temperatures and how that’s going to affect aquatic species Michigan is, is throwing a lot of money into these species that they’re introducing up up in northern Michigan. They are arctic grayling is one of them that they’re trying to get back. It’s been there. And I’m trying to make it make it a successful return. So with all of this, we’re working with these tribes in northern Michigan, help disseminate this type of information. So we’re a year into this project, we’ve got roughly another year to go. Right now we’re doing a lot of computational work, to try to get everything ready to go. So that we can start analyzing the data, start inputting climate scenarios and, and summarizing all of this info.

BRAD NEWBOLD 15:41
So what are some of your primary hypotheses then that you’re you’re testing or looking at with this.

DARREN FICKLIN 15:47
So with the rain on snow stuff, we assume that rain on snow is going to decrease. Right? That’s not what you would necessarily think. But when you have, and we actually what we found in Northern Great Lakes Basin, it increases in the southern Great Lakes Basin, it decreases the rain on snow events. And largely because you don’t in the southern portion of the Great Lakes Basin, you don’t have any snow. And you need rain to occur on snow, for rain on snow to happen. So while while we are warming in the in the southern Great in the southern Great Lakes basins, Southern Michigan, Northern Indiana, Northern Great Lakes basins up like Lake Superior, there’s still going to be snow there. So what we’re seeing is that there’s going to be an increase in rain on snow events. So flooding, for example, and on the southern portion, and we’re seeing a decrease on rain on snow. And right now we’re looking at these implications of what that does to stream temperatures. So the hypothesis for the water temperature aspect is if you don’t have a snowpack to cool the water temperatures, alright, so if you think about a snowpack that just slowly slowly melts, you’re you’re constantly inputting cold water into your stream. What happens when that’s gone? What happens to the water temperatures when those gone? Can these trout which are trout and salmon, which are really economically important for this entire Great Lakes basin? What happens? Are they are they able to migrate out of there? Are they even able to exist? We know that they’re going to be stressed out, but how stressed out? Are they? So that’s kind of the general hypothesis is when you don’t have snow? What happens? Right, yeah, right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 17:21
With that, so you’re primarily looking at at those those fish species? Is there concern with the plant community or other, you know, other organisms as well that, that as you know, again, it is are you seeing the, you know, trout and others as kind of like the The Harbinger or canary in the coal mine of how things the rest of the the ecosystem might might react to this change?

DARREN FICKLIN 17:46
I don’t know much about the plant communities. But if you think about warmer waters, they’re usually more productive. So what that brings in, I don’t know invasives. There’s a whole question of on the plant community that I’m not an expert on, we were looking at trout and salmon, because that’s when you think of these idyllic streams in northern Michigan. They’re trout and salmon streams. That’s what that’s about people spend a lot of money to go up and do. So we’re looking at those. And the tribes that we’re working with on on that particular project that they’re very interested in as well, as far as these the fish species. Right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:21
And is it? Is there a concern with you mentioned invasive species? Is that a concern with invasive fish species? Or is it mainly just the decrease in the the trout and salmon, just so

DARREN FICKLIN 18:31
something we will be able to do is see if, if invasive fish species are able to live? Well, we’ll have a whole whole ensemble of stream flows and water temperatures, and we’ll be able to say which species can survive there. Because generally, we know what fish species like, what they don’t like. So we can develop all these scenarios. And there’s a lot of invasive talk in Lake Michigan all the time. With all of these Asian carps, whether they can eventually make it in there or not. So it’s something that we could do. And something that we probably should do in the end as well to see if if these invasive species are able to even survive there.

BRAD NEWBOLD 19:15
So what are some of the, I guess, parameters? Were some of the data that you’re collecting, in order to and to to model and forecasts going forward?

DARREN FICKLIN 19:26
Yeah. So this is we work with the hydrological model. And if you’re not familiar with hydrological models, just think of it as a big bunch of equations that all talk to each other, right. And the general input to these equations are precipitation temperature, and then the model essentially tries to figure out what happens with the water as it goes through the landscape. That’s generally what these models do. The model that we’re working with, which is the Soil and Water Assessment Tool, which is an open source model, it uses a lot of GIS layers. It uses a lot of the equations that I mentioned. So That’s what we’re kind of working with for this model for this project, and we collect a lot of observations, but most of these observations have already been collected by the USGS, the EPA, we’re also working in Canada, some because Great Lakes go up there. So we’ll use Canadian data. But largely the data that we use for this for this large scale project, the data already exists, so that that makes our lives a lot easier. And because it’s an open source model, we can do a lot of different things with it. So one example that we did implement rain on snow into this model, which it did not do earlier. So we can we can test a lot of these different hypotheses using this this large scale model.

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:35
Right. And so there’s the I guess, a separate maybe connected project in that was funded by the NSF with with hydroclimate. And so yeah, getting data from Yeah, high resolution streamflow, water temperature, GIS modeling, all that kind of stuff. Can you connect it, or go into a little bit more detail about what’s going on with that with that project?

DARREN FICKLIN 20:57
Yeah, I mean, it’s essentially the same, we’re developing these large scale models for all of the all of North America. And essentially, what we’re producing, and what we’ve already produced is a database of water temperatures and stream flows in the future, for essentially every, let’s say, every big water body in North America. So we developed a website to where the user can go and click on a particular watershed or basin, and they can download, essentially 1950 to 2100 projections of water temperature and streamflow at the monthly time step. We’re in the middle of writing this, what they call a data paper up, we’re in the middle of writing this right now, or what’s essentially going to be introduced to the community where they can start using it. But the methods that I just mentioned in the previous project, it’s the same methods just really big scale. So in both of these projects, we’re using supercomputers to do this otherwise, you know, the desktops that we’re talking on? Not able to do that type of computational work.

BRAD NEWBOLD 21:59
Right. Right. And with with a lot of this, this modeling into streamflow and temperature, I guess you have some other publications, even more recently in, in nature, water, dealing with the impacts of from what you’re finding, I’m assuming this is what from you’re finding from these these models? And from current current research, and the impacts and and the implications for for yeah, water resource management and other things. Can you go into a bit more detail about about that?

DARREN FICKLIN 22:35
Yeah. So I took a sabbatical last spring. And during that time, I was in England, and I was working with some colleagues in England, and we all essentially got together. These were all water temperature people. We all we all got together, we figured out you know, what don’t we know about water temperature. And when we look started looking back at the literature, we noticed that a lot of the water temperature studies that are they assumed natural conditions are there on these these northern Canadian rivers, Scotland, Scottish rivers that are just like perfect rivers, which if you go south and latitude, those don’t exist anymore. And so what we thought is like, you know, we need to know more about what’s happening with water temperature in urban landscapes when you have pipes. And when you are agricultural landscapes and we have an NSF funded project going on right now we’re looking at the influence of tile drainage, on on water temperatures, as well. So we really want to understand what water temperature is doing in these really mucked up environments where we barely understand the hydrology. And we want to know what the hydrology is doing to the water temperatures and what what we’ve what we’re doing and what that nature water paper kind of calls out as for just way more observations in these regions where we don’t know anything about in the most screwed up environments. Let’s do some observations and see how water temperatures react to precipitation events or heat waves or droughts because we really don’t know what’s going on in these really, really managed systems.

BRAD NEWBOLD 24:06
Right with with that, how are you going about? I guess, just from a so we talked about the modeling but but even just kind of boots on the ground type of field research, how are you going about collecting the data for, you know, for instance, it looking at at tile drainage effects on on stream temperature?

DARREN FICKLIN 24:27
Yeah, we spent a month in the summer going out and deploying water temperature sensors all over the Midwest. And we specifically selected basins that have not much tile drainage and in basins that have a lot of tile drainage. And we kind of installed these, these water temperature sensors along the spectrum of no tile drainage to a lot of tile drainage. Those are those are taking data right now. I hope that so we will, that’s one thing we’re doing is we’re going out and we’ve installed 20 and we’re probably going to stall five to 10 more sensors. So we’re going to have a lot of data Uh, hopefully right now, but we’re going to go out and collect it more in the fall. And we’re going to use this information, try to understand what these agriculture practices are doing for water temperature. And if you’re not familiar with tile drainage, it’s, it’s all over the Midwest, and we don’t we know how what tile drainage does to water quality that’s really well studied, but not not necessarily water temperature, which is kind of determined water quality is that as well, right? Yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 25:26
Right. I was gonna say I probably should have should have back this up a little bit, could you get go into a little into maybe not too much depth, but could you just explain tile drainage and how it’s how it’s used within the agricultural settings.

DARREN FICKLIN 25:39
tile drainage is essentially pipes underneath the landscape underneath agricultural landscapes. And it’s essentially what it is, is it keeps the groundwater table from coming up to the surface. And, and it drains any water that comes in contact with it. So it’s a perforated pipe. And that perforated pipe collects soil moisture, it collects groundwater, and it takes those pipes essentially, it’s a highway for water and it takes it to the nearest water body. And that that’s an agricultural ditch or river. So you can see how this would affect would affect water quality. But But the goal of tile drainage is to keep your soil from being waterlogged, either from groundwater or soil moisture, any water that intersects it, it’s essentially gone because the pipes are perforated. So that’s that’s kind of why the Midwest is is is so agriculturally productive. Most of Northern Indiana was a wetland at one point and when you throw tiles in a wetland, they’re gone, essentially. So yeah, it’s all over the place, so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 26:43
interesting. Along with that, are you measuring any kind of other issues with water quality? So you talked about I mean, you’re focusing on temperature, but but anything other you know, other chemicals, you know, nitrates or pesticides or other things like that?

DARREN FICKLIN 26:58
Not really any chemicals other than water temperature, I’m not a not a water chemist. I don’t have a I don’t have a wet lab. I can understand water temperature. That makes sense. My PhD student right now is getting his PhD in geography, but his dissertation is on how tile drainage affects hydrology. Specifically, he’s looking at the flashiness of streamflow how fast the hydrograph goes up, and that goes down. Right now we started to look at how tile drainage affects drought, whether these tile drainage drained watersheds are more susceptible to drought than their counterparts without much tile drainage. So we’re looking at the hydrology aspect as well. We have several new students coming in in the fall that will probably more along they’ll take the water temperature work. And right up all right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 27:43
Okay. All right. I know that you had some other some other research looking into hydrological intensification and and just how that might impact water resource management. You just dealing with with precipitation events and their duration, their their size. Can you go into explain a little bit about that, that project there?

DARREN FICKLIN 28:13
Yeah, so defining hydrological, densification is essentially too much water and then not enough water. So it’s exactly what has been happening in California, where they’ve been having this drought, drought, drought, drought, and then they got huge snowpack, right. If you if you think about how to manage reservoirs with no water, and then you get a lot of water, do you release that water into the streams? Or do you need to back that water up in case for the next drought, to store that water? So there’s kind of a you got to it’s a complex decision, whether they need to do release the water store the water so that’s essentially what that project looks at. And it basically looks at extreme precipitation events, and then how long between the next one? So one thing we expect with climate change is extreme precipitation events, and then a dry period between them. So that’s kind of what that study is looking at. And we did, we did a lot of climate models, and we looked at what’s going on throughout the world, specifically tying that into how you can manage that with water, and how you can manage that with reservoirs.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:18
Right, right. Yeah, no, going back to California. I know that I mean, with excess water they’ve been, we’ve got Tulare Lake that’s back again to Lake.

DARREN FICKLIN 29:27
It’s now a lake! It’s a lake now!

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:29
It’s a lake. It was a lake and then it wasn’t a lake and that’s the lake again. And again, going back to Yeah, water issues in in the arid west. And especially with with agricultural side of things. Yeah. There’s, there’s a lot of issues. And I mean, again, it’s one of these things where where we see this, like you’re saying we see this in these particular regions, but but then these are just kind of prototypical of what what the potential is elsewhere throughout the world as well?

DARREN FICKLIN 30:03
Yeah, yeah, it’s just that the West United States is and other arid regions, which is completely dependent on reservoirs. Yeah. So yeah, yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 30:12
So what are you? I mean, did you come up with any suggestions for, for water management, I mean, you talked about reservoir management or other things like that. So

DARREN FICKLIN 30:22
I worked with Sara Nall, out of the Utah State. And she that’s, that’s her specialty. And we don’t have many good recommendations. Other than that, you know, you kind of need to start thinking about this. planning out really extreme extreme scenarios of what happens when you have a really wet year, and then five dry years behind it. And you know, you didn’t need to kind of run these in their, in their models, these reservoir management models to see what are we going to do? How can we do this? Or at least at least start thinking about this stuff? I mean, hopefully, California now is in the western United States now is thinking about this, but you know, maybe start implementing some policies. In case this happens again.

BRAD NEWBOLD 31:02
Right, right. Right. All right. Well, let’s switch gears here a little bit and talk about bugs. And I know this isn’t your main specialty. But yeah, I was gonna say, did you ever think that you’d be an entomologist? No, no. So pretend to be one. So yeah, let’s talk about let’s talk about Brood X Cicadas and their emergence in 2021.

DARREN FICKLIN 31:26
Yeah, so if you’re not familiar with Brood X cicadas, they come out of the ground every 17 years. And these are not, these are not flies. These are several inches in length, and a half an inch in width. So these are big, these are not, these are big bugs, they they can they can ride along on your hair or your back. So they come out every 17 years. And essentially what happens is when they come out, they leave these gigantic holes in the ground about the size of a dime. And these burrows go about, they can go up to 60 centimeters deep. So they can go relatively deep. So they emerge from the soil, they make their way up the tree. There, they can’t fly yet, when they when they emerge, they eventually can when they when they break out of their shell, but they’ll crawl up the tree. They’ll mate on the tree. And then the larvae or nymphs will fall to the ground, dig into the soil, and they stay there for 17 years. So the research question was essentially, how does this how do these burros affect infiltration? infiltration rates. So I actually did this project in 2004, as well, which was the last emergence that was a that was an undergraduate project I worked on here, at IU. It’s come full circle come full circle. The next one is, the next one is 2038. So I’ll be ready for them. So essentially, what we did for this is we contacted the NSF hydrological sciences program, and we said, there’s going to be a big disturbance coming, can we have just a little bit of money and what we did, is we bought the METER Group, SATURO units infiltration units, to go out and measure this, so and these are these cicadas they’re can be a million per acre. So the ground looks like Swiss cheese. And there are areas in the same landscape which may not have any, any cicadas whatsoever in them. So the reason that they don’t have any cicadas is maybe there’s construction there between this and the previous 17 years. So what you’ll see is, you’ll see a lot of cicadas and these, these this fence rows or urban forests where essentially there’s not been anything worked on in the past 17 years. So what we did, we took about 90 measurements with the SATURO unit all over Bloomington and we did it in urban landscapes in forested landscapes. And specifically, we had two of these units. One unit was measuring the infiltration rate, where there’s a lot of cicada holes, cicada burrows, and the other one was not it where there were no cicada holes. So they’re, you know, roughly two meters apart, we could kind of kind of find areas where there weren’t any emergence holes. And what we found was that we found almost an 80% difference in infiltration rates in forested landscapes. So they these these bugs caused quite a bit of an increase in infiltration. We did not find any difference in urban or urban landscapes though, which was, which was very interesting. And we attribute that to there’s a lot of compaction, soil compaction in these urban landscapes. So cicadas have a rough time, I guess burrowing down and they’ll tend to have shallow or shallower burrows. And what we think is essentially if you have shallow burrows, you can take on less water. So we didn’t actually see any difference of infiltration rates. So that’s essentially what we what we found that that project it we still have a ton of data that we’re working on, but it’s officially going to wrap up this fall. So we there was An army of graduate students and undergraduate students all over Bloomington, surrounded by cicadas and taken all of these measurements, but it was, it was the easiest research question I’ve ever developed. Because it was it’s just right, it was just right there in front of us, you know, how does this affect water, so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:16
Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, I want to get into more of the results with that hydraulic conductivity. But, but what Yeah, dealing with with the timing, because you know, that it’s coming was it was a difficult to get funding ahead of time to plan up and say, Hey, I need it by I need to have this ready to go bye, bye, you know, was it spring 2021? Or whatever it may be? And then and then also, secondary to that, is that is the timing within your, your measurements? As as well? Is there? Is there? Is there a timing issue? Where where those holes, then will will fill in? And then you might not have the right, you know, the right results that that might or I guess the more accurate results they might get earlier on? So two questions are about timing?

DARREN FICKLIN 36:10
Well, the answer is yes to both timing is very important. So the the product at the NSF project that we funded that we asked for funding was NSF rapid and rapid means you don’t need to go through the review, go through the program manager, and they will essentially cut you a check to do what you’re requesting to do. So that process didn’t take too long. I don’t remember but month, month and a half or so, that had to start in March, or mid spring to get that happen. And then essentially, once I got the money, what the only hold up was getting the equipment to me. And that that that was that was on time as well. So I got the equipment in roughly mid May, maybe late May. And they all emerged in mid May, late May. So the timing was kind of very important. I had to get the measurements as soon as they soon as they got here as soon as they emerged. The other question, yeah, we had to get we had to get these measurements quick. Because it was noticeable, especially in the Midwest, when leaves started falling from the trees, big storms sediment, filling it up back up a sediment. So we wanted to get as many measurements as we could, I mean, we took 90 measurements, which was essentially five days a week with four or five people out in the field. So 90 measurements is quite a bit for this for this type of work. Now, we only used about 70, because there were some issues with the soil afterwards. So we can go into those a little bit later. But yeah, timing, we had to get it. We had to get all these measurements as quick as possible.

BRAD NEWBOLD 37:40
Yeah so yeah, so let’s, let’s get into so how are you? So we talked about using the SATURO Infiltrometer, how are you, how are you using that? How are you doing your site selection? Yeah, could you get into just kind of the nitty gritty of how the the field process worked?

DARREN FICKLIN 37:59
Yeah. So we know, we wanted to compare the cicada infiltration rates in in forested and urban landscapes. So that that was kind of criteria number one. And essentially, we had a forest that we worked in, so we were pretty good there, we could we could find the cicada holes, take the measurements, and then look around several meters and find an area without nice decadal holes, and then we would just set these two units up at once. And they would they would just be going for, you know, two or three hours, however long they go. Urban was a little harder. We mostly concentrated our measurements in parks, parks and lawns, where we had permission to be in there taking measurements. But essentially, we needed to, we needed to find areas where the emergences were pretty, have a pretty high rate. And then and then work backwards from there. Okay, so that that’s generally the fieldwork. And then we would we took 90 measurements in total, and we use 70. I think for the paper that was published earlier this year on this.

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:01
So with that, you said you found an 80% difference between the disturbed and undisturbed when when it comes to is that field saturated hydraulic conductivity is that correct?

DARREN FICKLIN 39:11
That’s Kfs (field saturated hydraulic conductivity). Yep fields such as oh, yep.

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:14
And, and so I guess, is that what you were expecting? We’re expecting more or less or, or does that sound about right?

DARREN FICKLIN 39:25
We didn’t know what we would expect that areas with high ticket emergence borrows, you would have higher infiltration rates. That makes sense, right. And we expected that to happen. But we did not see that in urban landscapes for for the reasons I previously mentioned. So hypotheses Yeah, we should see higher saturated hydraulic conductivity rates and areas with with higher emergence rates. Yeah. But we didn’t know the percent because this, this hasn’t been done. Yeah, we had no idea. We had no idea, you know earthworms. I think it’s 10%. Okay, but this was pretty I mean, these are big holes, these aren’t earth worm holes so I mean.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:00
Yeah these Yeah, right these are large macropores.

DARREN FICKLIN 40:02
Yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:03
I guess one of the other questions that I had was, do you see other, you know, macro invertebrates like like cicadas or any other animals along those lines that have potentially as big as an impact as what you were seeing? I guess the biggest impact on soil hydrology, as what you’re seeing with cicadas are.

DARREN FICKLIN 40:25
Not in this area, not in this area. I mean, this was a really intense emergence to where there’s the soil look like Swiss cheese.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:34
Right. So I mean, you’re talking about millions per acre, right?

DARREN FICKLIN 40:37
Yeah, so there’s nothing around here that does that. So no, I think this was the this was the as high as the Kfs. Probably could be in forested landscapes. And so now we’re starting to think about what are the implications of this type of work? Right. Yeah. And in one of the things we are looking at is this potential, what happens in underneath this groundwater? What happens underneath the groundwater, where there are papers in review about what happens with soil respiration? When this when this happens? So carbon carbon fluxes and nitrogen fluxes? So the implication so I kind of started out as the water person, and I’m kind of building on what are the implications of other aspects.

BRAD NEWBOLD 41:21
Right. Right. Because I mean, especially with you know the emergences, like like these, I mean, they’re huge, but they’re, they are only, you know, 17 years apart. That’s, that seems like a, it’s a very long time when you’re dealing with especially lifecycles of of invertebrates. But is it is it something where, where we might see, I mean, I guess, man, like, climate change comes into play, as well as that, as the climate changes, I’m assuming that putting my my fake entomologist hat on is that I’m assuming that that this emergence is triggered by by environmental factors, potentially, I mean, for it to be 17 years. I mean, for other for other emergent, you know, species, it’s based off of, you know, you know, degree days or other things like that, where, where there’s those internal processes, that that trigger these things. Do you see potentially, I mean, I guess, couple questions here. Do you see climate change affecting the emergence of of cicadas, you’ve been you’ve been doing some work in, in climate change in the region. But then on the other side, as well, is that could the cicadas as as we’re as urbanization expands or dealing with the impacts of, you know, water flow within the soil? Could there be changes or future impacts? To any kind of degree where we we might need to mitigate or manage the issue?

DARREN FICKLIN 42:52
Yeah. So as far as climate change, they emerge when it’s the soil has been 64 degrees Fahrenheit for three days. So they’ll start to move up. So if you want to just warm up the soil, then they’re going to emerge earlier right now, why they come out every 17 years? I could not find a good answer for that. Whether the cicadas kind of track the number of you know, summer cycles, I don’t know I don’t put my fake fake entomology head on to and but I don’t know why they emerge every 17 years. But if you talked about climate change, it’s all dependent on soil temperature for them. So warm up soil, and they’re gonna merge earlier into the year so maybe instead of mid May, they’re maybe gonna move early May alright, and it’s gonna screw up graduation around here. The the the other thing is, is there the nips, essentially hanging out in like a little feeding cell and these feeding cells are attached to a tree root. So cicadas have to be where trees are at all times. So they are not going to they’re not going to emerge in the middle of a soccer field, unless there was a tree there 17 years ago, right, so they need to be near trees, because that’s what they feed on the roots. So but from our studies, we think, you know, all these deforestations, suburban housing, moving out, anything that’s going to disturb that top of the soil column where these nymphs are hanging out right now is going to wipe out the cicadas are there they’re not going to they won’t come back in these areas. And I live in an old neighborhood where their cicadas were all over the place. And right across the street was a new subdivision. There were no cicadas in that entire subdivision.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:33
Interesting.

DARREN FICKLIN 44:34
So, so that type of land use management will certainly wipe out cicadas.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:39
Right. Right. Well, any other interesting stories, I guess, when you’re dealing with with bugs, there’s got to be some funny stories about people getting attacked by bugs or Yeah, well, more or anything.

DARREN FICKLIN 44:53
My wife went grocery shopping with two cicadas on her shoulder the entire time. That was a common occurrence when you go to the grocery store during that time period. As I was walking my dog around the neighborhood, I talked to another dog owner whose dog had to get their stomach pumped. Because they’ve eaten so many cicadas out in their yard. They’re the moles were outrageous. I’ve never seen more moles in my yard. During this time period. Everyone was eating well, the birds are eating well everyone was eating well, at this time period, it was even so even so there the birds were having a buffet there were still there were still so many, then the noise was deafening. Yeah, yeah, it’s wild. It’s it’s a wild experience for for about a month, month and a half.

BRAD NEWBOLD 45:40
Yeah, man. Well, well, good luck in 2038 when they’ll be back, though, coming around again, you’ll have everything everything ready. Yeah, I was gonna say come and come 2038. I mean, if you put your, your, your future you hat on? Do you have any other questions that you would like to investigate when it comes to soil hydrology with with cicada emergence,

DARREN FICKLIN 46:00
I would love to get some groundwater wells in. I would love to get a sense I know where they’re at. I’d love to get some soil moisture sensors that go deeper in the landscape and actually see what happens to soil moisture during during precipitation events. And so these questions are endless now that we know a little bit more about what they do. We can be a little bit more prepared for this, even though we had 17 years to be prepared for it. We we still we still had to rush it through it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:28
All right. Well, I’m sure we’ll be in touch then.

DARREN FICKLIN 46:30
Yes, yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:31
When that comes around, so.

DARREN FICKLIN 46:32
Go ahead and get the equipment ordered now.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:34
That’s right we now have to sit around for 17 years. I don’t think our warranties last that long.

DARREN FICKLIN 46:40
Ah okay we’ll have to renew that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:42
Yeah, all right. So let’s switch gears one final time here. You had a project a couple years ago that you’re working on in dealing with crowdsourcing and citizen science when it comes to hydrology and just looking at watershed data. Can you talk about that little is it is the Boyne river research project. Is that Is that correct? I pronounced that right. Yep. Yeah, so the Boyne river research project, yeah can you go into a little detail about about that project, how it started and why you were looking to use a citizen scientists?

DARREN FICKLIN 47:19
Yeah, it was in the Boyne River. This was a river in northern Michigan, kind of the same types of rivers, we just talked about lots of trout, lots of salmon, lots of people spending money to fish on this. And we, I worked with people at a crowd hydrology.com, where most of this information come from, and we kind of got an idea of like, okay, so the USGS, they do a really good job of measuring streamflow and water temperature, but they can’t do everything. And they can’t really get these smaller rivers. So what would happen if we installed some citizen science measurements, citizen scientists, devices, and these devices, it’s a ruler in a river, that’s all it really is. It’s a ruler in a river on a piece of wood. And the top of the ruler says, Call text this number with the height of the water. What we did a little unique with this project is that we also installed digital thermometers as well. So there’ll be two, two poles in the water, what is it and what’s the water temperature, and there’s a digital screen that says, you know, whatever, whatever temperature it is. And both of these have signs that say send this data to Texas, Texas, this information that gets cataloged somewhere and it just waits on us to do something with it. So at the same time, we were developing one of these hydrological models for the Boyne river. And the really the research question is, can we use this citizen science data for hydrological modeling? Usually, we use USGS data, because it’s, it’s reliable, it’s accurate, etc. But if we were successful, right, so we got a lot of these citizen science measurements, and we use these citizen science measurements, we didn’t get a lot of them, but they’re certainly enough to do what we wanted to do. So we integrated these measurements into a hydrological model model was relatively accurate. And we were we could do some things with this model. And what we did was we developed a website to where we would forecast the streamflow in the water temperature for up to seven days in the pants, not too different to what you’re seeing on the phone with the weather, to where the local community can can click on a particular day and seeing what the water temperature is going to be in a particular stream or each, you know, five days from now. So ultimately, it worked. You know, the main issue with this type of work is the uncertainty of the data with the USGS, you know, you know what you’re getting and it’s pretty reliable, but here we were getting we know we know that the know that the water level is not 15 feet. You know, we know we know that so we’d have to throw that information out. I would have people send me pictures of the of the gage just is not not what I wanted. But we would get a lot of different different types of data that we couldn’t use. And if someone sent us a data that was one foot, that’s a reasonable number, right? We don’t know if that’s right, or whether it’s wrong, but something that we had to account for when we’re developing these hydrological models of this region. So

BRAD NEWBOLD 50:24
So yeah, so a couple well, first question yeah, do you, I mean, do you bake some some, I guess, some variability into into that model when you’re dealing with with those data?

DARREN FICKLIN 50:35
Yeah, so what we did a Data Assimilation technique, and we can assume some uncertainty associated with that, right? I don’t remember what number we use, but you know, think about plus or minus 10%, or, you know, whatever, whatever that is, we can kind of bake that in which it’s useful when you’re working with this type of data to do something like that. Because you don’t know what you’re getting.

BRAD NEWBOLD 50:57
Right, yeah. And I think with any kind of forecasting models, or any anything along those lines, I mean, we’re dealing with probabilistic models, where, where’s your, you’re dealing with a range of certainties? And so yeah, so yeah, even for even for, like you mentioned, you know, our weather forecasts, or whatever, you might say, oh, you know, the Weather Channel says it’s going to be a high of this and this, but they’re, they’re basically taking that, you know, that mean, or whatever it may be of their models and saying, Hey, this is our, our, you know, 95% certainty or something along those lines. Yeah. So yeah, all that kind of stuff is kind of baked in, that we take for granted, when we’re when we’re dealing with models on a daily basis.

DARREN FICKLIN 51:36
Yep. That’s essentially what we had to do. You know, we knew roughly, workflow from previous work, we knew what the uncertainty should be, we could kind of bake that in, and we’re gonna be around a range rather than an exact value.

BRAD NEWBOLD 51:51
Right yeah. And if you were, if you were to do this again, or revive it, or, you know, do it somewhere there in Indiana. What are some of the improvements that you think you’d could make in dealing with kind of crowdsourcing citizen science data?

DARREN FICKLIN 52:04
Well, where we worked with, and Boyne, we worked with a community within Boyne called the Friends of the Boyne River, and they are heavily invested in the Boyne river. So they would go out and take measurements for us a lot. Alright, so one of the things that we learned from this type of type of study is you can’t just pick another watershed, you need to have a community that cares about the river. Because if they don’t, then you’re not gonna get the measurements. So there’s really no use of you being there. All right. So we targeted the Boyne river because we had worked with or some of us have worked with the Friends of the Boyne River, who would we know that they would they paddle the river all the time, they clean up the river all the time. So we developed a relationship with them prior to even starting to study. So if I were to pick a watershed in Indiana, we would need to do the exact same thing. Like I said, otherwise, if if the citizens aren’t taking observations, there’s no citizen science going on. Right. So there’s just no point. So that’s kind of the big take home message there.

BRAD NEWBOLD 53:08
Great, we’re getting close to our time. Any any final thoughts for our audience about about stuff that you’re working on? Or? Or anything that we’ve talked about?

DARREN FICKLIN 53:19
No, I mean, I think we’ve mentioned a lot. A lot of the stuff that we’ve talked about are kind of still going, for example, the rain on snow that we mentioned earlier on, some of this still going on. Citizen science, we’re always trying to bring up we’ve always talked about going out to the Yellowstone and doing something very similar to look at a different research question out there it’s flooding. In Northern Michigan, it’s more species, aquatic species. So yeah, a lot of these a lot of these projects that we talked about are kind of they’re still going on. And some future research projects were usually largely dictated by the students that I work with their their interest, and they may not be interested in, in flooding, they may be interested in drought, and we’ll go we’ll go that direction with them so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 54:04
Right, right, awesome. Alright and if anybody in our audience wants to find out more about this stuff that you’re working on, where might they be able to go?

DARREN FICKLIN 54:15
You can always send me an email at D-Ficklin, [email protected]. I don’t know what social media exists at this point. Right now it’s X, I don’t know what it’ll be. But I am, I am @d_ficklin on Twitter/X. If you want to find me there. We would maybe talk to talk elsewhere. So that those are the main ones send me an email, always happy to chat about these projects and get something going.

BRAD NEWBOLD 54:45
Okay, awesome. Well, our time is up for today. Thanks again, Darren, for being with us. We really appreciate you taking time to talk with us today. I know I’ve enjoyed the discussion. I hope that those in our audience, have as well.

DARREN FICKLIN 54:58
Had a great time. Thank you for having me.

BRAD NEWBOLD 55:02
Stay safe and we’ll see you next time on We Measure the World!