By Emily Wasen

In the cold months of spring semester 2022, I was sitting in my 8:30am Conservation Biology lecture dreaming of the warmth of summer, wondering what was in store just a few short months when I was told about an undergraduate research assistant job exploring the effects of wildfire. An announcement that would soon change the trajectory of my senior year of college. Little did I know at the time, my summer heat would be coming from a Minnesota wildfire.

In June 2022, I was fortunate enough to begin as an undergraduate research assistant with Dr. Ian McCullough in the Data Intensive Landscape Limnology Lab at Michigan State University. Going into this experience, I was very nervous. I had no prior lab experience except in a few of my classes and did not know what to expect. I am a Zoology major with a concentration in Zoo and Aquarium science and minors in Environmental Sustainability Studies and Marine Ecosystem Management. That being said, my previous knowledge about wildfires was fairly limited to what I have been told by Smokey the Bear. With my natural love of animals and constantly learning more about their biology in my classes, the chance to focus more on the environmental side of an ecosystem sparked my interest in applying for this position. Reading more into the project, I thought it was fascinating to look at not only what happens to the environment after a drastic change, but also how that environment can bounce back in the coming months and years.

Sign with Smokey the Bear, showing fire risk in Superior National Forest, Minnesota.

Our project focuses on the repercussions of the 2021 Greenwood wildfire in Isabella, Minnesota. The main goal of this project is to understand the effects wildfires have on lake water quality. This study is the largest of its kind as we are looking at 30 different lakes (15 in burned watersheds, 15 in unburned watersheds, i.e., control) over five months. Lots of wildfire research has been done in the Western US, but not much has been looked into in the Midwest where wildfires are becoming increasingly more common. The summer of 2021 marked especially high temperatures paired with very dry weather. This fire in particular is recorded as one of the largest in state history.

A side-by-side comparison of the differences between the shoreline of a burned lake (Stony Lake) and a control/unburned lake (Flathorn Lake).

I was very excited to be granted the opportunity to go out to the burn site and aid in collecting data. The MSU team and I were able to travel up to Minnesota in both June and July of 2022. In the field we traveled out lake by lake via canoe or pontoon, collecting water samples to take back into the lab to further look at different variables such as phosphorus and nitrogen. In looking at these variables we expect phosphorus and nitrogen to increase in burn lakes due to the runoff from the burn area. This is significant to other measured variables as well as it promotes primary productivity, as measured in chlorophyll. We also recorded different characteristics to aid in putting together different lake profiles, of which included dissolved oxygen content. This variable shows direct correlation to lake stratification and how nutrients runoff from the burn area affects the lake’s water quality. It was so cool to be able to be out in the field and see how the wildfire has visibly affected the environment, especially seeing the regrowth that had already begun. My favorite part was canoeing out onto each lake. The scenery was beautiful to look at whether burned or unburned; it was so peaceful to be out continuously immersed in nature.

Working alongside Dr. Jennie Brentrup in MN collecting a water sample on Stony Lake.

This position allowed me to gain my first lab experience as well as my first field experience. I learned so much this summer and I am continuing to do so with the help of all the amazing people I have had the privilege of working side by side with. This has been such a great experience so far and I am happy to have the opportunity to be continuing our research this semester. Having been out in the field this summer makes it that much more interesting when we have new data coming in that we get to analyze. I am grateful for all the important skills I have learned over the past six months. Working on this project has opened me up to new possibilities and potential career paths I can explore post-graduation. I am looking forward to continuing my work in the lab and am excited to see how the data will play out and how it will influence other studies in the years to come. 

My name is Andrea Paul and in May of 2022, I joined the Data Intensive Landscape Limnology Lab at MSU to work as an undergraduate research assistant with Dr. Ian McCullough. My major is Fisheries and Wildlife with a minor in Environmental Studies and Sustainability. I have had a strong interest in animals since I was born and as I got older I began to appreciate the complex ecosystems behind them. My deep interest in animals combined with the knowledge of the disastrous effects humans and climate change have had on the world has sparked my passion for conservation and sustainability. I didn’t know what direction this would take me in my career, but I knew that I wanted to take advantage of the research opportunities this university provides. I am a strong believer in the idea that you don’t know what something is like until you try it, so I wanted to see first-hand what research was like and if it would be something I could see myself doing in the future. This position in freshwater and fire ecology aligned with my interests and matched my goals of gaining research experience, building technical skills and enhancing my knowledge of ecology.

The research project I joined is studying the effects of wildfires on lakes. Wildfires are becoming more and more prevalent in the American West due to climate change and lots of research has been targeted to that location, but not a lot has been involved in the Midwest. Many research projects on wildfire and limnology (the study of inland waters) have solely looked at rivers and streams, but this project is unique in that it focuses on freshwater lakes. Specifically, we looked at how the 2021 Greenwood fire in Isabella, MN affected the water quality of 30 surrounding lakes in the Superior National Forest. We had 2 field trips to Isabella, MN where we sampled the lakes for nutrient concentration, acidity, chlorophyll and more. We expected that the forest would have intense burn marks with little of the past vegetation left. Instead what we found was patches of burnt areas interspersed with unburned areas. It was very surprising to see how mixed the landscape was in terms of fire damage. We also expected that our water quality data would show an increase in nutrient concentration between May and June, as the burned nutrients run-off into the water after the snow melts. This prediction did hold true and I’m excited to see what the following months show us. That was my first experience doing research in the field and it was so much fun! I learned how to use sampling instruments, I met some amazing researchers and I got to experience what a huge effort it requires to conduct a research study. Now we are using the data we collected, along with data from LAGOS, a public database of all US lakes, to determine the relationships between variables such as burn severity, nutrient concentration, time since fire in R, a freely available statistical analysis platform. 

My experience this summer working on this project has been eye-opening and very rewarding. I really enjoyed sampling the lakes, seeing the Superior National Forest and contributing to research on limnology. Understanding historical fire regimes, past studies on how wildfires affect lakes and wildlife while building my knowledge and skills around research was very enjoyable and I believe it will help me in my future career. I am continuing to work this semester in the lab while the project comes to a close and I am eager to see how the project wraps up and the implications it will have on future research in understanding the effects of wildfires on lakes. 

The Backstory of One Young Graduate Student’s Research

By Marcella Domka

In August of 2020, I started my ‘next step’ after college as a graduate student at Michigan State University. I knew from the moment I received an invitation to join the Data Intensive Landscape Limnology (DILL, find more at https://bigdatalimno.org/) lab, a lab that bases many of their projects and endeavors on big data, that I was facing an exciting challenge. Big data was a fairly new concept to me. I had several research experiences during my time as an undergraduate that helped me understand the vastly complex world of ecological interactions and freshwater systems, but none that spanned the extent of the entire United States and included thousands of lakes. It was daunting, to say the least!

However, I knew that I had a strong interest in freshwater ecology and wildlife, and wanted to better understand environmental interactions between biota (living components of an ecosystem) and abiota (non-living components of an ecosystem) at a much larger scale. The DILL lab was the perfect place to embark on this journey of greater understanding. I began my first semester as a master’s student working with my advisor, Dr. Kendra Spence Cheruvelil, a co-founder of the DILL lab. I remember that one of the first ‘tasks’ she assigned me was to brainstorm ideas for what would eventually become my thesis research. I had quite a few thoughts bouncing around in my head already, so I was happy to take this on and dive right into the questions that the fields of ecology, limnology, and big data science have to offer.

Right away, I knew that I wanted to study something about eutrophication. Eutrophication, or the excess concentration of nutrients in freshwater environments, is often caused by point and nonpoint sources of pollution (e.g., septic tanks and fertilizer runoff from agriculture, respectively). This excess of nutrients can lead to algal blooms that remove oxygen from the water. This results in hypoxic conditions and subsequently the death of many aquatic organisms. 

During an internship I had through the NSF-funded LAKES (Linking Applied Knowledge in Environmental Sustainability) program in summer of 2019, I studied the widespread eutrophication and phosphorus pollution of Lake Menomin in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was a fantastic experience in which I learned a wide variety of laboratory and field techniques, conducted literature reviews and composed a graduate-level research poster, and most of all, learned which elements of freshwater ecology were most intriguing to me.

I realized that integrating eutrophication as a major component of my thesis research would allow me to continue studying this concept that I clearly had a passion for. Eutrophication, and the concentrations of nutrients that may indicate eutrophic conditions, would be the foundation of my research. 

Before my first research question could be fully formulated, however, I had to consider an additional component. I knew upon my acceptance to the DILL lab that I would be working with the LAGOS-US RSVR database (find more at https://lagoslakes.org/), which contained hundreds of thousands of data rows about two types of waterbodies: natural lakes (NLs) and reservoirs (RSVRs). A ‘natural lake’ is typically naturally formed, with no apparent flow-altering structures present, whereas a ‘reservoir’ is a lake that is likely to be human-made, or include some sort of large flow-altering human made structure. Natural lakes and reservoirs are different in a variety of ways, with reservoirs typically being warmer in temperature, with larger watershed areas and larger ratios of basin to lake/reservoir surface area. Additionally, reservoirs are not well studied in comparison with natural lakes.

 Part of the cornerstone of my research would be to investigate major differences between these two types of lakes, including differences with nutrient concentrations, which is where eutrophication comes back in to play. Thus, my first research question is: are natural lakes or reservoirs more likely to have higher concentrations of total phosphorus and chlorophyll-a and lower water transparency (variables that typically indicate eutrophication)?

Yes, I did mention ‘first’ research question. And yes, while I was happy that I would be studying nutrient concentrations across two distinct waterbody types (natural lakes and reservoirs), I knew there was something else missing from the scope of my research. From a very young age, I’d always loved everything about the natural world, but something about wildlife was especially captivating. I knew my master’s thesis wouldn’t feel complete without a wildlife component. 

After bringing this interest up to my advisor and getting feedback from my other DILL lab members, I did some searching to find readily available wildlife data. I decided to use waterfowl (aquatic birds such as ducks, geese, mergansers, etc.) data from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (find more at Migratory Bird Data Center – About the Atlantic Flyway Breeding Waterfowl Survey). After performing a detailed literature search, I understood that there were myriad factors that may influence waterfowl use of aquatic habitats (such as lakes and reservoirs), so I knew that incorporating these data with the LAGOS nutrient data would form the perfect ‘second’ research question. Thus, I’m asking: are natural lakes or reservoirs more likely to be associated with more species of and more abundant waterfowl?

 Once these questions were finalized, I felt that my thoughts and passions were truly fueling my research questions. I came to graduate school to address multifaceted ecological questions, and I feel that I have embraced that process. While brainstorming, writing a thesis proposal, and performing months of data exploration and statistical analysis have proved challenging, I haven’t regretted anything. The only way forward is understanding.

by Ian McCullough

Academic researchers are trained to package their science as neatly manicured manuscripts. We provide an overview of a topic and then describe what we did, what we found and what it all means. Rarely, however, do we hear about how an idea or project came to be in the first place. Today, I would like to pull back the curtain and share an anecdote about an important day in my research career.

It was late June 2016. At the time, I was a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara. On the backend of a road trip to Oregon for a wedding, I stopped in Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, an off-the-beaten-path park I would imagine few Americans have even heard of. 

Early in the morning of my only full day in the park, I left my beautiful campsite along Manzanita Lake and headed east along the park’s only major road toward the Cluster Lakes Loop. Having previously lived in Maine, I sorely missed these formerly glaciated, lake-rich landscapes that in California could only be found at the highest elevations. 

One thing I did not miss about Maine was the mosquitoes. Even though it was late June, at an elevation of about 7000 ft (2134 m), the snowpack had not completely melted beneath the shady coniferous canopy, which meant there were plenty of puddles ripe for mosquitoes to breed. Having grown used to the dry climate of Southern California, I clearly was not prepared for this, so my solution was to bundle up and walk quickly.

After basically putting my head down and booking it for a few miles, suddenly the mosquitoes disappeared. I found myself in complete sunlight and the air felt significantly warmer and drier. It turned out I was in the middle of a burned area from the 2012 Reading Fire. As I walked through the skeleton of the pine-fir forest, I couldn’t help but notice how the fire had transformed what would have been a cool, dark, wet, mosquito-infested patch of forest into a warm, bright, dry, mosquito-free patch of forest. Clearly, the fire had had an effect on the landscape, and probably in many more ways than just these.

What a difference a fire can make across the landscape. These forest patches were just a few hundred meters apart, yet their environments were completely different. The top patch was shady, cool, moist and mosquito-infested, whereas the bottom patch was bright, warm, dry and mosquito-free. If fire effects on the terrestrial landscape are this noticeable, what about fire effects on the freshwater landscape?

Before long, however, I came across some lakes with completely burned shorelines. Clearly the fire had affected the landscape, so what about the lakes? Their watersheds probably were completely scorched and all sorts of nutrients and materials could have ended up in the water. Soon after, I encountered more lakes with completely intact shorelines, at least some indication that their watersheds might have avoided the fire. As I finished my hike, I wondered if anyone had ever studied fire effects on lakes. I filed this thought away, but didn’t necessarily expect to revisit it.

In 2016, I encountered several nearby lakes within the same landscape. Some had heavily burned shoreline and watersheds, whereas others largely escaped the fire. What were the ecological implications for the lakes, I wondered?

Fast forward about a year later and I’m in a brainstorm session with my new research group at Michigan State University, where I was starting as a postdoctoral researcher. I casually mentioned that I was interested in fire impacts on lakes. One of the professors’ eyes lit up and one of my first projects ended up being a review paper on the fairly limited amount of existing lake-fire research. The amusing title “Do lakes feel the burn?” was inspired by some roadside graffiti I encountered on my aforementioned 2016 trip (it was an election year). Years later, this foundational paper still produces new research collaborations and grant proposals as fires continue to torch many parts of the US.

Fresh off a hike through some burned lake watersheds, some election-year (2016) roadside graffiti inspired the lighthearted title of the 2019 review article “Do lakes feel the burn?” https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14732

Even if you don’t study lakes or wildfires, part of my hope in sharing this anecdote is to illustrate just how seemingly ideas might come to you randomly in life yet how career/life-impacting these can be. Personally, I rarely come up with very interesting ideas while sifting through spreadsheets and data graphs. So if you’re searching for inspiration, whether for science or otherwise, maybe a “walk in the park” is all you need. 

New and exciting things are happening for the LAGOS (Spanish for lakes) team. After years of hard work, their first core and extension data modules of LAGOS-US have been published. Even better, they are open access, providing the opportunity for wide and free use.

The LAGOS-US research platform provides data and tools to study lake water quality at the continental scale. LAGOS-US data modules include the conterminous US, which has 479,950 natural lakes and reservoirs larger than or equal to 1 hectare. This month, the LAGOS-US core  data module LOCUS and the extension data module NETWORKS were released. LOCUS contains locational, identifying, and physical characteristics for these nearly half million lakes and their watersheds. NETWORKS includes 898 lake networks across the US and provides quantitative surface water connectivity metrics for those networks and the 86,511 lakes in those networks. Stay tuned for future data module releases!

Along with the public release of LOCUS and NETWORKS, the LAGOS team is excited to announce the official launch of their first Twitter campaign. The LAGOS-US account can be found using the handle @LAGOS__Lakes (note the double underscores). 

The primary aim of @LAGOS__Lakes is to raise awareness about the availability of LAGOS-US data products and tools for others to use and extend. The LAGOS team hopes to inspire new users to study US lakes at broad scales of space and time. 

Twitter posts via @LAGOS__Lakes will use a weekly #LakesForLunch hashtag, with info about a unique US lake and its lagoslakeid for reference. Be sure to keep an eye out for these posts by following @LAGOS__Lakes and keep up to date with your fellow lake lovers!