Municipal Stadium Wetland, Springfield Ohio

Probing wetland prior to sampling.

The Municipal Stadium Wetlands were created by a levee failure in 1937.  The levee break remained unfixed and the wetlands were created by subsequent inundation.  Additional flooding was allowed in the last two years by the incision of a flood bank of Buck Creek that drains into the wetland. (This resulted from class project work by geology students working with Dr. John Ritter).  

Dr. John Ritter and his students have installed instrumentation in the wetland to monitor changes in water stage, pH, ORP, temperature, and turbidity (See Fact Sheet). There is interest in the site from the City of Springfield Wetland Article by Tom Stafford

While the size of the wetland is small, nutrient (fertilizer) management continues to be a huge problem for the Mississippi River Basin.  Low-cost mitigation options might include targeting riparian areas of streams like Buck Creek for additional innundation and wetland creation. This site is ideal for study because watersheds like the Upper Great Miami that have among the highest nutrient loads (Combined Sewage Overflow & agricultural runoff).In fact, our class plotted data from a recent USGS study showing that the Great Miami is in the top 30 N and P loading watersheds of 800 that feed the Mississippi River basin and in the top 5 for watersheds in Ohio.

Geology of the Critical Zone is conducting a baseline study of the nitrate and phosphate concentrations in the wetlands during the drier period of the early fall. An upper-level projects class will conduct temporal sampling during the Spring Semester when the wetland will flood.  This class will expand investigations of nitrate and phosphate and also examine chemical weathering (and its role in climate change). It is relatively unknown how mineral weathering is altered by the presence of wetlands, and yet this process regulated the earth's temperature over geologic timescales.

Buck Creek adjacent to the Municipal Stadium Wetland.

 

  

Discussing where to collect nutrient samples.

Field trip! Olentangy River Experimental Wetland Park

Dr. William Mitsch with our  Geology of the Critical Zone class at the 'planted wetland'  Olentangy Experimental Wetland Park

Muskrats & many birds are members of the wetland community

On Friday, we traveled to the Olentangy River Experimental Wetland Park.  Here we met with Dr. William Mitsch, an author of many peer reviewed articles, an OSU Distinguished Scholar, and the innovative scientist behind the creation of the experimental wetlands that are internationally known. Dr. Mitsch provided us with some good analogies on how wetlands function as kidneys and we were able to view the two created wetlands (one planted with wetland vegetation, one not planted). To learn more about the experiment and see some great pictures of the wetlands that actually look like kidneys check out this site: swamp.osu.edu
Thanks for the tour!  

 

Scale of Observation

Evan sits on top of the piece of the outcrop that has fallen off.

Up closer you can see the swiss cheese markings in the bedrock and the plants and spiders on the surface.

Task one for our class was to observe sites near campus. We looked for evidence of critical zone interactions at distinct scales. For example, from afar we noticed that a piece of bedrock had fallen over and that there were many other fractures in the rock, perhaps pointing to the reason why the rock had toppled. We also noticed that some places were distinct colors, and in cases those rocks appeared stained. At a much closer scale, we noticed the swiss cheese texture of the bedrock and the spiders that hid in dark places.

At the next stops we noticed that Buck Creek had evidence of human manipulation. The manicured lawn we sat on, trash floating in water, the straight channel edge. These converged with nature: water, trees, and muck. How would our hypotheses be different at different scales? Could we ask the same questions if we examined the ground near an invasive shrub by the waters edge as we would ask if we were sampling water flowing in Buck Creek that reflected the signature of the landscape and groundwaters it drained?

The bank of the stream contains vegetation, we wondered if it would be the same 1000 years ago.

Looking downstream we thought about how examining one small plant, or rock, would reveal very different things than collecting water from the entire stream.