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!