Session 3 -  Water Management

On the Banks: An Environmental History of the Red Cedar River at MSU

3:45PM  Oral Presentation 
Authors: Eric Tans
Presenting Author: Eric Tans
Contact: tans@msu.edu 

The Red Cedar River is one of the most notable and beloved features of the Michigan State University campus, with the opening line of the MSU fight song encapsulating the role the river plays in the hearts and minds of all Spartans while grounding it within the campus that is “on the banks of the Red Cedar.” The history of the river and its relationship to MSU’s is long and complex, reaching back to the very founding of the school, yet the Red Cedar’s role is largely overlooked in historical accounts of the campus founding. Additionally, while the Red Cedar remains an icon of MSU it is also misunderstood by many members of the community who regard it as dirty and dangerous. While concerns about pollution and the safety of the river may have been valid up until the 1970s, the river today is much improved and part of a healthy aquatic ecosystem. It is through learning the history of the Red Cedar that we can understand the river today and its place within the MSU community. 

This presentation will describe findings from primary research into the cultural and environmental history of the Red Cedar River carried out in the MSU Archives and the MSU Libraries Murray and Hong Special Collections, with a goal to recontextualize not only the significant role the river played in the creation of the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan but also the current status of the river. The methods used to conduct this study included historical and archival research that examined books, articles, historic land records, maps, campus planning and departmental reports, university board minutes and annual reports, theses and dissertations, newspaper articles, government publications, photographs and other materials related to the history of the river available, both online and in print, through the MSU Archives, MSU Libraries, the Capital Area District Libraries Local History Collection, and the Nokomis Learning Center. 

Key findings of the study include the pivotal role the river played in the formation of the school, the ways in which the growing campus degraded the quality of the Red Cedar over time, and how research conducted on the river contributed to its recovery, with a final conclusion that knowing the river and MSU’s shared history can lead to a better relationship with the iconic river for all Spartans. 

Presenter Bio

Eric Tans is the Sciences Coordinator and Environmental Sciences Librarian at Michigan State University. He is the liaison to the Department of Community Sustainability and to non-academic units like the MSU Office of Sustainability, the MSU Surplus Store and Recycling Center, and MSU Bikes. His research interests include sustainability in academic libraries and the environmental history of the iconic Red Cedar River on MSU’s campus.

The Effects of a Mandatory Flood Risk Disclosure Law on Rent Prices in Texas

4:00PM  Oral Presentation 
Authors: Iris Margetis
Presenting Author: Iris Margetis
Contact: margetis@msu.edu 

Seven states in the United States have passed their own version of a mandatory flood risk disclosure law for rental properties, mandating landlords with rental units in high flood risk areas to disclose their properties’ risk to prospective tenants prior to the signing of a lease agreement. These policies aim to increase salience on flood risk and address market failures in housing. In this paper I examine such a law for rental properties from Texas. Specifically, I explore i) the effect of the disclosure law on rental property prices, ii) whether the law exacerbates existing inequality in flood risk exposure, and iii) how making information salient might sharpen the law as a policy tool. Using proprietary CoreLogic data on Texas’ rent prices for the years 1970-2024 and combining it with FEMA’s National Flood Hazard Layer and Census data, I compare rent prices and sociodemographic profiles before and after the policy was passed for rental units located in high flood risk areas versus outside the floodplain. Preliminary results show that rent prices are lower for rental properties residing in floodplains, compared to those with no flood risk, following the passage of the law, indicating that information disclosure led to more efficient outcomes by ensuring that flood risks are reflected in property rent prices. Lastly, using a difference-in-difference identification, I add to the minority of studies in the mandatory environmental disclosure policies literature employing DID models. To my knowledge, I am the first to conduct research analyzing the effects of a mandatory flood risk disclosure law for rental properties.

Presenter Bio

Iris is a 5th year graduate student in the Department of Economics, pursuing a PhD in Environmental Economics. She earned her B.A. in International Relations, and her B.S in Applied Mathematics, with a concentration in Probability and Statistics, from Kent State University. Her current research focuses on climate change and the effects of mandatory flood risk disclosure laws for rental properties on rent prices and environmental justice.  Iris was born in the USA but grew up in Greece. She is an avid reader/traveler and loves meeting new people and connecting with different cultures!

Irrigation adoption in a “water rich” environment: implications for future water resource management

4:15PM  Oral Presentation  
Authors: Caitlin Nelson (nels1026@msu.edu) and Molly Sears (searsmo1@msu.edu)
Presenting Author: Caitlin Nelson
Contact: nels1026@msu.edu

Irrigation adoption has been significantly increasing in the eastern United States, rising to over 3 million acres in 2022 in the Great Lakes region alone.  While there is traditionally enough cumulative precipitation during the growing season for most field crops in the region, increased climate variability has led to an increase in prolonged dry spells. In response, producers have turned to the adoption of irrigation systems to help mitigate climate risk. This significant expansion may impact the availability of water resources in the future. We generate a novel dataset of all center pivot irrigation systems in Michigan from 2008-2017, and estimate the adoption of an irrigation system, based on soil, climate, crop, and market conditions. We then simulate irrigation adoption under mid-century climate conditions and examine the effects on underlying water availability. Our spatially heterogeneous results have significant implications for agricultural producers and policymakers alike.

Presenter Bio

Caitlin is a second year master's student at Michigan State University in the Agriculture, Food, and Resource Economics department studying irrigation adoption trends across the state of Michigan.

Making “Remote Sense” of Modern Annual Irrigation Extent Classifications within the United States

4:30PM  Oral Presentation  
Authors: Jeremy Rapp (Rappjer1@msu.edu), Anthony D. Kendall (kendal30@msu.edu)
Presenting Author: Jeremy Rapp
Contact: Rappjer1@msu.edu 

Irrigation is the largest global consumer of freshwater, accounting for nearly 70% of withdrawals in 2010 and represents 90% of the consumptive fresh-water usage. Therefore, it is imperative to have a reliable representation of irrigation on Earth's surface for terrestrial modeling purposes, global water security accounting, or investigations of how communities adjust to shifting climatic conditions. Within the United States a suite of products quantifying irrigation extents have been produced from a variety of sources ranging from national survey data to remotely sensed Earth observations. Currently, the highest resolution adopted product for the United States is Lanid an annual 30 meter Landsat derived irrigation presence map spanning the contiguous United States for years 1997-2020 which is used by the USGS in its irrigation water use at the watershed level estimations that are a component of the National Hydrologic Model. However, determinations of irrigation water usage in the western United States have been calculated of the IrrMapper product and the OpenET platform. This means that estimates of the same quantities are being calculated with an underlying discrepancy in their reference to what may be irrigated. These products all share similar machine learning approaches in their use of random forest classifications and are evaluated against each other in their original publications using traditional validation methodology. These evaluations, largely conducted using confusion matrices, only tell us about performance and not spatial agreement. Here we compare these irrigation extent products along with two other products directly to each other using the jaccard index and a modified version of the Mapcurves Goodness-of-Fit along a common boundary in the Western High Plains Aquifer. We reveal that these products, despite having similar reported performance, do have substantial product to product variance through time and space noting that low precipitation years (2002 and 2012) result in greater spatial agreement across all products. Diving further into these similarities we see that other data sources used in these classifications may impact similarity as well, including the timing of USDA Census years or the years that Landsat satellite platforms come online or go offline. In general these comparisons give additional insight into how these products represent irrigation and what that might mean for their usage in further efforts like water usage determination.

Session 3 – Water & Health 

Tracking sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the Detroit metro area by molecular analysis of environmental sample

3:45PM  Oral Presentation 
Authors: Liang Zhao (zhaolia4@msu.edu), Heidy Peidro Guzman (peidrogu@msu.edu), Irene Xagoraraki (xagorara@egr.msu.edu)
Presenting Author: Liang Zhao
Contact: zhaolia4@msu.edu

Background: Knowledge of wastewater surveillance methods and applications for estimating bacterial infections is limited. This study describes one of the first investigations applying wastewater surveillance to monitor Chlamydia and Syphilis and back-estimate infections in the community, based on bacterial shedding and wastewater surveillance data. 

Methods: Molecular biology laboratory methods were optimized, and a workflow was designed to implement wastewater surveillance tracking Chlamydia and Syphilis in the Detroit metro area (DMA), one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the US. Untreated composite wastewater samples were collected weekly from the three main interceptors of Great Lakes Water Authority’s Water Resource Recovery Facility that service the DMA. Additionally, untreated wastewater was collected from street manholes covering three smaller neighborhood sewersheds in Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland counties. Centrifugation, DNA extraction, and ddPCR methods were optimized and performed, targeting Chlamydia trachomatis and Treponema pallidum, the causative agents of Chlamydia and Syphilis, respectively. The limit of blank and limit of detection were determined experimentally for both targets. 

Results: Both targets were detected and monitored in wastewater between December 25th, 2023, and April 22nd, 2024. The magnitudes of C. trachomatis and T. pallidum concentrations observed in neighborhood sewersheds were higher as compared to the concentrations observed in the interceptors. Infections of Chlamydia and Syphilis were successfully back-estimated through an optimized formula based on shedding dynamics and wastewater surveillance data.

Conclusions: This study fills multiple important knowledge gaps in the field of wastewater surveillance. First, this study demonstrates one of the first wastewater surveillance applications in monitoring widespread sexually transmitted infections, particularly Chlamydia and Syphilis, in a large urban area, as well as smaller neighborhood sewersheds. This study established a workflow of implementing bacterial wastewater surveillance, where molecular biology laboratory methods were optimized to detect and quantify C. trachomatis and T. pallidum in wastewater. The results highlight the utility of wastewater surveillance as a screening tool to complement the clinically reported cases of bacterial infections. Second, the results of different concentrations of C. trachomatis and T. pallidum in wastewater in different sewersheds, demonstrate disparities in corresponding contributing populations with varying socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Third, Chlamydia and Syphilis infections were back-estimated using a modified formula based on investigations on shedding dynamics of C. trachomatis and T. pallidum in environmental and clinical samples, revealing potentially under-reported cases of both diseases in the Detroit metro area.

Presenter Bio

Liang Zhao is a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University, where he received his PhD in environmental engineering. He worked in the environmental virology lab under Prof. Irene Xagoraraki. Liang has used molecular microbiology techniques, mathematical, statistical models to develop pre-emergence systems that determine early warnings and predict existing and emerging communicable diseases, such as COVID-19, Influenza, RSV, STIs. Liang has published several peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Environmental Science & Technology. He has closely worked with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Great Lakes Water Authority, and Detroit’s health department on wastewater surveillance projects.

Optical Brighteners: Investigating a new/old method for bacterial source tracking as an indicator of human waste in the environment

4:00PM  Oral Presentation 
Authors: Brian Talsma (brian.talsma@macd.org), Nathan Hilbrands (nathan.hilbrands@macd.org),  Ryan Otter (otterr@gvsu.edu)
Presenting Author: Brian Scull
Contact: scullbr@gvsu.edu

Culture based methods, such as Colilert- 18™, have been the routine water quality testing method for microbial contamination for over 25 years, but are non-specific for human waste and require an extended incubation time; meaning, the results are reported the day after exposure to contaminated water may have occurred. Molecular-based methods, such as qPCR and ddPCR, can provide same day results and can be used to identify human-specific sources of contamination, however they require a significant investment in equipment, laboratory infrastructure, and are considerably more challenging to implement. Recently the use of optical brighteners, a cost-effective alternative method, has shown promise as an initial screening tool for the presence of human pathogen markers in environmental samples. Optical brighteners are synthetic compounds used in laundry detergents to make white materials whiter, and color materials look brighter, when exposed to the sun. Detergents and water from laundering clothes end up as components of sanitary wastes. A simple, inexpensive to use handheld fluorometer can be used in the field to detect the presence of optical brighteners in lakes and streams. These brighteners can serve as indicators of leaks in wastewater collection systems and/or problems with septic tanks.

The goals of this presentation are to 1) provide a critical review of optical brighteners as a screening tool; and 2) discuss recent results from our laboratory and field studies where optical brighteners have been utilized. 

Methodology

For goal 1, we will present how optical brighteners have been used by researchers in formal (peer-reviewed publications) and informal (e.g., citizen science) settings. For goal 2, laboratory methods included controlled experiments using of known household detergents to determine method sensitivity. Field work included comparing water samples from a small West Michigan watershed for optical brighteners, Colilert- 18™ and a molecular based method (ddPCR) for human DNA markers (HF183). 

Key Findings

Optical brighteners have been used successfully in both formal and informal settings as a screening tool for human waste. In the laboratory significant linear relationships were observed for a variety of household detergents. In the field we observed significant correlations between both E. coli and optical brighteners, as well as optical brighteners and HF183.

Conclusion

Optical brighteners can serve as an effective and budget friendly screening tool for human waste.

Presenter Bio

Brian Scull is the Laboratory Manager for the Analytical and Molecular Biology Labs at Annis Water Resources Institute in Muskegon, Michigan, with 25yrs of experience in ecological monitoring.

Fecal Detectives: Identifying sources of microbial contamination of two heavily recreated streams entering Lake Michigan beaches

4:15PM  Oral Presentation 
Authors: Brendan May
Presenting Author: Brendan May
Contact: maybre@mail.gvsu.edu

Introduction: Fecal contamination of watersheds can lead to negative health outcomes on humans and the environment. Within the state of Michigan, water quality thresholds for fecal contamination are in place to keep recreational waters safe. Indicator bacteria such as E. coli are commonly used to monitor for fecal contamination. When contamination is detected, Microbial Source Tracking (MST) allows for the identification of DNA in E. coli host species such as cows, pigs, and humans. In this study we investigated two West Michigan creeks with known E. coli contamination that flow into Lake Michigan. Both creeks flow through heavily recreated areas thus increasing the potential exposure to fecal pollutants. Previous MST analysis revealed human markers for fecal contamination at both creeks. The objective of this study was to conduct an assessment of pollution sources at both creeks to better inform public health intervention strategies. 

Methods: Two watersheds were utilized in this study: Little Black Creek (LBC) collects water from a largely residential area and Little Flower Creek (LFC) collects water from an area dominated by agriculture. We identified eight sampling points along each watershed and took triplicate samples during three separate sampling events. E. coli results were quantified using Colilert-18. For samples above the state advisory threshold of 300 cfu/100mL, MST of target species Human (HF183), Pig (Pig2Bac), and Ruminant (Rum2Bac) was conducted utilizing droplet digital PCR (ddPCR).

Key Findings: E. coli concentrations were consistently above 300 cfu/100mL and showed an additive downstream trend throughout the study in both watersheds. HF183 was detected in 32.6% and 2.9% of samples at LBC and LFC, respectively. Rum2Bac was the dominant marker at Little Flower Creek. Pig2Bac was not detected in either watershed. E. coli concentrations exceeded state thresholds in the upstream reaches of both creeks. The HF-183 detections at LBC were concentrated around campground areas and Rum2Bac detections were concentrated around stream crossings where heavy deer usage was present. 

Conclusion: E. coli and MST results were able to assess quantity and location of pollutants, but further investigation into potential sources is needed to establish guidelines and inform public health decisions. 

Presenter Bio

Brendan May is a Master of Public Health candidate at Grand Valley State University. At the Water Resources Institute he has conducted monitoring of Michigan beaches and creeks, monitoring of COVID-19 and other pathogens, and SARS-CoV-2 whole genome sequencing. His interests in Public Health include environmental health and emergency preparedness.

Impact of Rainfall on Fecal Contamination in a Michigan Watershed: A Study of Microbial Source Tracking

4:30PM  Oral Presentation  
Authors: Wenjing Ren
Presenting Author: Wenjing Ren
Contact: renwenji@msu.edu

Fecal pollution from multiple sources, both point and non-point, frequently caused exceedance of the State of Michigan Water Quality Standard for Escherichia coli (E. coli), a leading factor in the closure of recreational areas across the United States. Understanding the dynamics of fecal indicators population and microbial source tracking markers is essential for improving fecal contamination monitoring and watershed management. This study collected water samples from a watershed in Michigan, USA during dry and wet weather conditions. The objectives were to evaluate the presence of cultivable fecal indicator organisms (E. coli, coliphage, and Clostridium), evaluate the applicability of chicken-associated markers in Michigan, and determine the contributions of human, pig, and chicken sources to fecal contamination in chicken litter, farm drains, tributaries, and sediments, and also determine the effect of the rainfall events on microbial water quality. Droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR) was employed to quantify the abundance of human-, pig-, and chicken-associated genetic markers. The results showed that the concentration of human- and chicken-associated markers was higher after significant rainfall events. Additionally, fecal indicator organisms were observed in great concentrations in water samples post-rainfall. Our results suggest that the chicken-associated marker is effective for use in Michigan and that humans and chicken were the primary contamination sources in the watershed. Moreover, stormwater runoff can contribute considerable loads of fecal contamination.

Presenter Bio

Wenjing Ren is a postdoc working with Dr. Joan Rose at Michigan State University. Currently, her research focuses on Microbial Source Tracking, beach water quality monitoring, and wastewater surveillance, with particular interest in the fate and transport of fecal contamination in nature environments. She aims to advance microbial source tracking methodologies and develop science-based strategies for mitigating public health risks associated with waterborne contaminants.

Wenjing received her Ph.D. from Auburn University in the USA, and her Master's from the Ocean University of China.