Paul Szmal: FLX Morning continues. It's 8:39, cloudy skies. We're at 29. I want to welcome in our guest at this time, Dr. Adam Effler from the Wasco Lake Watershed Management Council. Adam, good morning. How are you this morning?
Dr. Adam Effler: Good morning, Paul. I'm doing fine, thank you. How are you this morning?
Paul Szmal: Doing well, as always. And I wanted to ask you, before we get into some of the topics we want to discuss, a question that was actually related to me from someone who listens to the program. They wanted to know if there's as much worry about sediment runoff in the watershed in the wintertime when the ground is frozen.
Dr. Adam Effler: Well, that's a great question. Generally, when the ground is frozen, the sediment tends to be more stable and there's reduced runoff. And that has to do with the sediment being locked up when it's frozen. The sediment, of course, absorbs water and that allows for the sediment to stay in place under a frozen condition. So, a little bit of a lesser concern there. However, this time of year, as we go into the winter season, we like to see construction projects stabilized before the winter. And so, aside from the fact that those soils may freeze and reduce sediment runoff into our local water bodies, what happens is, if it's stabilized before the winter, when we have snow melt and then subsequent spring rain, that sediment then does tend to run off at a higher rate. So, stabilizing those exposed soils is still, indeed, very important. And that's something that you can actually do as far as things like your gardens, stuff of that nature, as you get ready to put them to bed for winter.
Paul Szmal: That's correct. That's correct. Always good to stabilize and cover exposed soils before the winter, if possible.
Well, let's dive into some of the stuff that we want to talk about this morning. And thank you for answering that listener's question, by the way. We wanted to talk about the status of the Watersheds Venice Nature Preserve. We've been getting ongoing updates. So, what's the latest?
Dr. Adam Effler: Right. So, boundary posting and stewardship training with the Nature Conservancy, they're our partners on this project, took place on November 13th. So, that's this last Thursday. And our boundaries are nearly fully posted at the preserve. The Management Council staff will conduct a follow-up trip to finish the posting effort sometime here soon, although we may wait until after the hunting season to protect ourselves there. We are excited about stewarding the Management Council's now second nature preserve in an effort to protect watershed parcels from development and to maintain ecosystem functions within those areas. So, very excited about that next step with our most recent acquisition.
Paul Szmal: And, you know, that probably sounds to some people like difficult to wrap their heads around. But the idea here, to put it in simple terms, is that by preserving natural habitats, that helps to decrease that flow of sediment that you're talking about and the flow of contaminants into the lake and into the watershed.
Dr. Adam Effler: That's correct, Paul. Yes. So, those are a couple of what we refer to as ecosystem services that are provided by land preserves. And in fact, Mother Earth does a wonderful job of providing those services on its own. And so, land acquisition and preservation for the benefit of conserving those particular services is one of the best approaches towards protecting watersheds and lakes. So, you mentioned sediment stabilization and settling. There are also natural treatment processes for handling nutrients, nutrient cycling, habitat benefits as well, providing areas for some of our pollinators. So, there's a wide breadth of services that these particular preserves can provide.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. And upsetting this ecosystem, there's a lot of elements to it. And it's sort of like throwing a stone in the water. The reverberations will go out and out throughout the ecosystem.
Dr. Adam Effler: That's correct. That's correct. So, essentially, when there's an ecosystem, there are a variety of different flora and fauna that all depend on one another. And when we chip away at that through developmental activities, we can really reduce the benefits. And of course, in our primary interest, the benefits to protecting water quality for a salient drinking water supply, and that is Ahuasca Lake.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with Dr. Adam Effler from the Ahuasca Lake Watershed Management Council, and we're talking about protecting the ecosystem. That's what the Venice Nature Preserve is a part of that protection. And there's also the Nine Element Watershed Plan. And this plan has been around for a little bit now. What's the progress on the implementation of this plan?
Dr. Adam Effler: Absolutely. So, the Ahuasca Lake Watershed Nine Element Plan for Phosphorus Reduction, years ago by the New York State Department of Conservation, Environmental Conservation, that's the DEC, of course. And it's considered a clean water plan that advances efforts to restore and protect the water quality of Ahuasca Lake and its watershed. Really a collaborative effort, identified focused strategies to help ensure the lake drinking water supply, aquatic habitat and recreational areas are protected. And the development of the plan focused on understanding and managing phosphorus and sediment inputs from the Ahuasca Lake Watershed, and to provide for recommendations to drive watershed protection remediation projects concerning phosphorus reduction specifically.
So, as a quick reminder to your listeners, phosphorus is the limiting nutrient for what's considered eutrophication or the production of algaes and macrophytes or weeds within fresh water bodies. And what that means is that phosphorus is the nutrient in lowest supply relative to those organisms need for growth. And so what that means is it's a target for reduction to reduce the growth of algaes and nuisance weeds within the lake. So that's our target.
So the Management Council created a committee to advance the implementation of that now completed and approved clean water plan. And we've been working over the last several years to coordinate and facilitate projects and programming implementation based on the recommendations of the nine element plan.
Paul Szmal: Go ahead.
Dr. Adam Effler: Sorry, I wanted to jump in and ask the question with this nine element plan, reducing the phosphorus and that sort of thing. Is this assisting Mother Nature in some of the ecosystem cleanup, if you will? Or is this trying to undo damage that we have done over the years?
Paul Szmal: That's a great question. I would say that to answer your question, it's a combination of both, right? So through development activities, really the 1970s paradigm of channelization, channelizing tributaries and waterways to the lake, we have sort of veered away from leveraging the natural landscapes and the ecosystem services provided therein. So the old philosophy in terms of channelization was let's get water where it wants to go as quickly as possible. But the paradigm shift there with regards to allowing sediments to settle and reducing scouring within these waterways that leads to additional runoff and contaminant inputs into the lake is really to allow for natural meanders, to protect stream banks with hedgerows and with riparian buffers, and to allow for the natural formation of retention basins. Sometimes we'll actually create artificial retention basins now to slow down the water and allow for sediment settling.
So I think it's sort of a combination of both. We're remedying the philosophies of old channelization and rapid discharge of water to slowing waters to the lake, but also therein leveraging those ecosystem services, right? So the various vegetation that grows around stream banks that is contained within protected areas, those provide many of those nutrient cycling and sediment stabilization characteristics that we would like to protect.
Paul Szmal: And finally, I wanted to ask about measuring nutrients because in order to know what to do as far as nutrients going into the watershed and into the lake, you need to have data. And now there's not only the incorporation of real-time sensors for this sort of thing, but also what we love to call citizen science, what I would call people volunteering.
Dr. Adam Effler: That's correct, Paul. So we are incredibly fortunate in the Awasco Lake Watershed in that we have a very active and involved lake association with volunteers who for several years now have been advancing a watershed tributary monitoring project whereby on a bi-weekly basis they have collected water samples from the primary tributaries to Awasco Lake and for the purposes of lab analyzing primary constituents of concern. So those include nutrients of interest, both phosphorus and nitrogen species, as well as solids as really a surrogate for sediment loading to the lake.
And what we're trying to do now is to gain flow estimates or otherwise known as discharge estimates to the lake so that we can calculate what we refer to as loads. It's essentially the product of the constituents or contaminants, the sediment and or nutrients, and the actual flow of water moving to the lake, and it gives an estimate of the total quantity of contaminants entering the lake. It's been challenging in years past to estimate the flows or discharge information that's required to calculate those loads, and so we've got a proposal underway now working with partners from SUNY ESF out of Syracuse as well as our lake association to fund real-time sensors that will give us with some measure of confidence estimates of flow so we can make those calculations.
Paul Szmal: All right, as always Adam, fascinating conversation. Thank you for the information and we will talk to you again soon.
Dr. Adam Effler: It's my pleasure, Paul. Thanks for the opportunity.
Paul Szmal: It is 8:51 on FLX morning.
