Upcoming Events

Jennifer Josephs
National Research Council/Environmental Protection Agency

Since 2010, $87M have been spent on remediation and restoration efforts in the St. Louis River to improve ecological conditions. However, evidence to support the underlying assumption, that people living near or recreating within areas that undergo ecological remediation or restoration benefit from these environmental efforts, is rare and often indirect or mismatched in scale. Pre- and post-project measurements to identify changes in use and perception of how the area contributes to (or detracts from) human wellbeing is needed to assess or measure community benefits of these environmental restoration projects.

Mike Koutnik
Friends of Lake Superior Reserve

The Friends of the Lake Superior Reserve continues to evolve and grow our capacity to support the Reserve, and to engage with the community around the St. Louis River estuary. We will present highlights of our work in fiscal 2021 in this session. Some of those highlights include: conducting four birding events; advocating with Congress to support key funding for the Reserve and local partners; executing on our partnership with the City of Superior to adopt Wisconsin Point by conduct two annual beach cleanups; our first successful grant proposal (from the City of Superior) and how we invested those funds; attracting donations to support the Summit; supporting Reserve events; began recruiting volunteers to help staff the Estuarium; and building partnerships with local and regional organizations. We also added four new board members, certified an additional volunteer operator for the Reserve's research boat, and welcomed 50 new members. We will share more details about our accomplishments during this session, share a few key goals for 2022, and welcome your questions.

Diane Desotelle
City of Duluth

The City of Duluth is defined by its natural resources. It is a place where people in the region live, work, and play and a destination for visitors to enjoy recreating in open spaces while being close to urban amenities. Duluth is fortunate to have a third of its lands as public open space, and yet, there are minimal resources to manage the ecosystem pressures of a rapidly changing world. Over the past few years, the City has taken proactive steps along with their invaluable partners to come up with a Natural Resource Management Program Plan to improve how we manage these lands together. The first ever NRMPP for the City of Duluth is now being presented to the community with goals, strategies, and an implementation and tracking framework that will improve how we prioritize, fund and strategize our natural resources work together. It is geared for the technical community to implement, but it is designed for the public to be better informed, to learn of the importance of the work being done, and their importance as stewards of these lands. This presentation will give you an overview of the NRMPP and the hopes we have for moving into the future with a user-friendly, adaptable program that will preserve, repair, and nurture the City’s natural resources.

Katie Williams
USEPA Office of Research and Development, Great Lakes Toxicology and Ecology Division

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) identifies degradation of aesthetics as one of the beneficial uses of the ecosystem that should be restored. This beneficial use impairment was added to the GLWQA because at the time the agreement was written, debris and odors made it difficult or impossible to recreate on or appreciate our waterways According to the GLWQA, aesthetics are degraded when either “an objectionable deposit or unnatural color or odor” is present. In Areas of Concern, the objectionable deposits are most often oil slicks, odors, and trash, or attributes easily recognizable to both resource managers and citizens. If aesthetics can be recognized and characterized by people with different expertise, using aesthetics as a boundary concept can be a productive way to connect citizens with environmental management in a meaningful way to enhance both the ecological and social benefits of environmental restoration. Furthermore, aesthetics can become a method for documenting how people see the environment because they may or may not characterize impairments the same way resource managers do. This presentation is a status report and will share how the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) is documenting aesthetics and environmental change at Pickle Pond in Superior, WI and other sites around the Great Lakes. We will share preliminary data from a site in Ohio to describe the process and data we collect. We expect this study to become a longitudinal study of place, as well as a potential model for a crowdsourcing platform.

Melissa Sjolund, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources 
Joel Hoffman, US EPA Office of Research and Development

After three years of construction, Minnesota DNR (MNDNR) completed aquatic habitat restoration at Grassy Point and Kingsbury Bay in fall 2021.  Combined, these projects restored approximately 230 acres of coastal wetland habitat and will contribute to delisting the St. Louis River Area of Concern.  Grassy Point, the former site of turn-of-the-century sawmills, was restored by excavating legacy wood waste from the water and restoring shallow sheltered bay habitat.  At Kingsbury Bay, MNDNR restored coastal marsh habitat by dredging decades of accumulated sediment and removing monocultures of invasive plants.  MNDNR project manager Melissa Sjolund will discuss project background and objectives, detail the restoration process using photos and/or videos, and highlight future recreational and habitat enhancements.  EPA researchers (Sophia Green and Joel Hoffman) will describe the comprehensive post-restoration effectiveness monitoring program that they are developing for the project sites.

Dan Breneman
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency

The 21st Avenue West habitat restoration project utilized environmental metrics as engineering specifications so construction designs incorporated Beneficial Use Impairment targets. Metric values were used to quantify the relative change in condition offered by each design alternative. Prior to construction, the 21st Avenue benthic macroinvertebrate community was significantly impacted (pre-site value = 0.52) compared to a Least Impaired Target (LIT value = 0.67, p < 0.05) using a scaled Tri-Metric Index score. Over 750,000 cubic yards of dredge material was beneficially used to create a more complex bathymetric surface that would both mitigate contaminated sediment and restore shallow, shelter aquatic habitat. Two-years after construction, the 21st Avenue West benthic community (post-site value = 0.67) is no longer significantly different than an established reference target. Surface-area weighted averaging of condition using the Tri-Metric Index identified these improvements occurring over 40% of the project area, where extremely poor or poor ranked categories transitioned to a community no different than reference. By reaching a benthos community restoration target, these results provide justification for including the 21st Avenue West management action as part of an eventual St. Louis River AOC Degradation of Benthos BUI removal recommendation.

Lorena Rios Mendoza
University of Wisconsin-Superior

Microplastics (MPs) are plastic debris 5 mm or smaller in size that are an emerging aquatic pollutant whose potential environmental and human health impacts are not yet well understood. The field of microplastic study is young, and there is still much that is not known about the abundance and distribution of MP pollution across global and local geographies. While work has been done in the Great Lakes, many questions remain as to the sources, transport pathways, and impacts that MPs have on this important ecosystem and resource. In this project, we aim to shed more light on these issues by studying the source, fate and transport properties of MPs in the aquatic environment of Western Lake Superior and St. Louis River Estuary. A total of 60 samples from surface (9) and column water (9), beach sediments (12), shoreline algae (30) were collected during summer-2021. The preliminary results showed that the MPs are present in all the surface and column water samples. 50-70% of the total particles from surface and column water were analyzed by micro-FTIR-ATR spectrometry. 40% of the particles were identified as synthetic polymers and 40% were classified as natural polymer, cotton. 10-25% of the particles were classified as non-plastics. The samples from beach sediments showed the presence of multiple particle morphologies and preliminary analysis suggests that microparticles abundances vary with cross-shore location on the beach (e.g., sub-aqueous and sub-aerial sediments). Shoreline algae samples were primarily filamentous Ulothrix, and possible MPs comprised 69% of particles found, of which 72% were microfibers. Mean (± SE) particles/g Ulothrix (dry weight) was 194 ± 61 and ranged 17 to 695 particles. There was a noticeable decrease in microparticle abundance from sites within the St. Louis Estuary to those located on Lake Superior at Two Harbors, but this trend was not significant.

David Baldus
University of Minnesota Duluth, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Millions of dollars have been spent on stream restoration and habitat improvement projects in the Lake Superior watershed.  The effect of these projects on the ecological functionality of a stream reach is not well measured or understood.  This knowledge gap is echoed within restoration work worldwide.   This project seeks to start filling this knowledge gap by evaluating the ecosystem function in 4 full channel realignment stream restoration projects conducted on Lake Superior north shore streams from 2017-2019 using nutrient spiraling dynamics as a process-based measure of stream health and function.  Nutrient spiraling dynamics describe the level of benthic microbial activity and hyporheic processes within the stream corridor as well as the ability of the stream to increase uptake rates in response to increased nutrient loading.  The stream’s “resilience”, ability to adapt uptake rates, governs nutrient export within a reach, which impacts catchment-scale water quality concerns such as basin eutrophication. Thus changes in spiraling dynamics have implications for both stream health in situ as well as for the catchment at large.

Hannah Ramage
Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve

The Lake Superior Reserve’s System-Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) has collected in situ water quality measures in the St. Louis River Estuary since 2012. Collecting measures every 15-minutes during the ice-free season, the SWMP has logged over 700,000 individual data points across four locations in the estuary. Parameters measured include temperature, pH, salinity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity. I investigated monthly trends in each parameter from 2013 to 2021 using Kendall’s seasonal t-test and identified water quality anomalies in 2021 using a combination of time series decomposition and constructed benchmarks. Significant trends in water quality from 2013 to 2021 include increasing Summer and Fall water temperatures, observed at Pokegama Bay and Barker’s Island. Record-breaking high-water temperatures were observed in 2021 and anomalies include high conductivity, high pH, and low turbidity, likely reflecting 2021 drought conditions in the region. This summarization and analytical demonstration is the first step towards a new initiative by the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve to produce an annual report of water quality trends and annual SWMP summaries for regional scientists, natural resource managers, and curious citizens. I want your input on future reporting products. What data would you like summarized and how?  With the goal to put SWMP data to the most beneficial use, I hope to produce helpful summaries, analysis, and interpretation for you, the researchers, managers, stewards, and community members of the St. Louis River estuary. As the SWMP dataset grows, I remind everyone that this asset is public and accessible for everyone at https://cdmo.baruch.sc.edu/.

Gina LaLiberte
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

In Autumn 2021 two small, short-lived cyanobacterial blooms were spotted in the inner harbor of the Twin Ports and St. Louis River estuary. Testing results from one of these blooms revealed the first documented detection of cyanobacterial toxins in waters connected to Lake Superior. I will discuss the differences between these blooms in the estuary and the larger blooms that have sporadically occurred in the open waters of Lake Superior since 2012. I will offer tips for how you can distinguish cyanobacterial blooms from other types of algal blooms and lookalikes that may occur in the estuary, and how you can help scientific efforts by reporting cyanobacterial blooms in the estuary, Lake Superior, and other water bodies.

Facilitated by Hannah Ramage
Lake Superior Reserve

Monitoring efforts in the St. Louis River from 1953 - 2021 have revealed a dramatic recovery in water quality health. Studies comparing past conditions to the present  show that the waste regulation and Area of Concern remediation and restoration efforts have improved overall estuary water quality. Despite that progress, there are new rapidly emerging water quality issues. Estuary “hotspots,” or areas with cyanobacterial blooms and episodic hypoxia are emerging; however, estuary stewards and researchers lack a collaborative long-term water quality monitoring strategy that can effectively track emerging issues and act as a warning system. There is an urgent need to transition monitoring approaches from “looking back” to “looking forward” as the estuary faces new threats and stressors. This facilitated networking session brings the water quality research and monitoring community together to strategize a future water quality monitoring approach that makes efficient use of the resources and missions of multiple agencies, universities and organizations. Participants will be engaged in collective decision making to determine specific locations, parameters, timing, and approaches that are missing from current monitoring and research efforts. Potential funding opportunities and program collaborations will be discussed as a way to jump start an ongoing collaborative effort.

Facilitated by Luciana Ranelli
Lake Superior Reserve

Roxanne Gould, University of Minnesota-Duluth
Mindy Granley, City of Duluth
Arianna Northbird, Fond Du Lac Tribal and Community College

This session will explore the work of the Indigenous Women’s Water Sisterhood (IWWS), which is an initiative developed to raise awareness and take action to improve and protect the sacred Lake Superior watershed. The IWSS is a diverse group of Indigenous elders, scholars, educators and allies who work to decolonize approaches to water education intertwining both scientific Indigenous knowledge systems. The IWWS amplifies the voices of Indigenous women who have cultural knowledge and the responsibility to lead and teach how to respectfully interact with and maintain the health of water. The outreach of the IWWS is wherever Indigenous peoples in the world are working to center Indigenous ways of knowing, critical place-based education and water protection.

Kris Eilers and Alyssa Johnson
St. Louis River Alliance

Since the designation of the St. Louis River Estuary Area of Concern in 1987, concerned citizens, agencies and governments have collaborated to move the AOC closer to delisting through restoration and remediation projects. The success of this collaborative effort is transforming the river and creating a path to a higher quality of life. The impacts of this transformation are now becoming clear in the revitalization of the river communities, better access to the river, new trails, and a heightened appreciation of this resource. One of the results of a cleaner river is the newly designated St. Louis River Estuary National Water Trail. As the manager of the water trail, the St. Louis River Alliance is facilitating an advisory council to implement steps of a master plan. This presentation will give an overview of the impacts of the restoration, highlighting the National Water Trail and its benefits, and provide information to learn more about it.

Samuel Geer, Urban Ecosystems
Cliff Knettel, City of Duluth

Waabizheshikana (The Marten Trail) is an interpretive trail that runs for 10 miles along the Saint Louis River in Duluth.  The trail is set to begin construction in 2022, and its design was a collaborative effort by a host of stakeholders.   Samuel Geer, of Urban Ecosystems will share the process by which the team sought to celebrate the plants, animals and landscapes along the waterfront. The plan collects stories of noteworthy people, river places and lost landmarks that are revealed to visitors by a constellation of interpretive elements.  By revealing the invisible, the plan aims to cultivate understanding and respect for the unique power of this landscape and those who have shaped it.

Richard Stewart
University of Wisconsin, Superior

The St. Louis River Estuary is the border between Douglas County, Wisconsin and St. Louis County, Minnesota. As the estuary has been cleaned up, opportunities for sustainable tourism using new biking, hiking and waterway trails have emerged. However, relying solely upon automobile access to these trails is less than ideal in terms of energy consumption, congestion and access for diverse user groups. This presentation will explore options for developing sustainable estuary tourism using rail, bus and marine systems. 

The estuary has two historical railroads that operate in the summer with limited winter service. These railroads are adjacent to or cross several of the existing or proposed land and water trails along the estuary. The North Shore Scenic Railroad starts in the Duluth Superior harbor and passes by two other harbors before terminating at the port of Two Harbors, MN. The Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad starts near the mouth of the St. Louis River and connects to Boy Scout Landing, serving a marina and public docks. The presentation will provide models for the multimodal use of these railroads to link to water, biking and hiking trails. 

A comparative analysis is made between the Duluth Winnipeg and Pacific bike trail and the Hiawatha bike trail to evaluate the potential for a bus to bike connection. This final part of the presentation will focus on a commercial water taxi providing multimodal links to existing and future biking, hiking and waterway trails in the estuary. The possibility of utilizing solar powered vessels will be explored.

All registered Summit attendees are welcome to attend the event’s poster session, where presenters highlight updates from new and ongoing work connected to the St. Louis River area. This is an opportunity to connect with colleagues and community members, too! The event will have food, drink, and an opportunity to win prizes.

This year, the poster session will be hosted in-person at UW-Superior’s Yellowjacket Union, March 8th, 4:30-6:30PM. The session will make use of the ample space in the Great Room to showcase posters in a socially-distanced manner. Facial coverings will be required inside the building. Digital versions of the posters will also be made available for viewing online.

Parking at Yellowjacket Union
To park at the YU, please use only lots 2 or 11 (the two parking lots located north of the Union, view campus map). After 3:30 pm, parking restrictions will not be enforced in those two lots. Guests should only park in unmetered and unmarked parking spaces. Please do not park in spaces that are reserved with signage, have a Yellowjacket sign, or that have a meter. Unmarked and unreserved spaces without a meter in lots 2 and 11 are available to Summit guests.

This year’s event is “Bawa'iganaakoog (Wild Rice harvesting sticks)”, featuring Marne Kaeske, Cultural Preservation Specialist for the 1854 Treaty Authority. Join us to construct wild rice knocking sticks and get prepared to hit the rice bed during Manoominike-giizis (wild ricing moon). All materials and instruction included.

This event will be held at the Yellowjacket Union on UW-Superior’s campus, upstairs in room 203. Face coverings are required inside the building.

For this River Talk, registration in advance is required since this River Talk is hands-on and requires supplies. We have materials for 15 participants. If you know you would like to attend Bawa'iganaakoog, please sign up using this form: https://forms.gle/trdxExKZfi169XAG8. The form will close when the event limit has been reached.

For questions about this River Talk event, please reach out to Luciana Ranelli at 715-399-4085 or luciana.ranelli@wisc.edu.

Parking at Yellowjacket Union
To park at the YU, please use only lots 2 or 11 (the two parking lots located north of the Union, view campus map). After 3:30 pm, parking restrictions will not be enforced in those two lots. Guests should only park in unmetered and unmarked parking spaces. Please do not park in spaces that are reserved with signage, have a Yellowjacket sign, or that have a meter. Unmarked and unreserved spaces without a meter in lots 2 and 11 are available to Summit guests.