InSites is a quarterly newsletter that highlights the personalities and projects of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) of The University of Tennessee. WMREI is an affiliate of the EERC.
WMREI was created in 1985 as a state-funded Center of Excellence. Research areas include solid-, hazardous-, and nuclear-waste management; waste minimization; and pollution prevention.
Biotechnology is the focal point of the institute's technical research, while issues involving public attitudes and federal/state policies related to waste-management issues are the primary concerns of the institute's policy research.
For additional information about InSites, or to be added to our mailing list, please write InSites, WMREI, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, call 865-974-1156, or fax 865-974-1838. Or, if you prefer, e-mail Constance Griffith cbgriffith@utk.edu.
Table of Contents
ERODING VALUES, By
Kris Christen
VISITING
SCIENTIST CONTRIBUTES TO CEB RESEARCH, By
Kris Christen
MIDDLE
EASTERN EXCHANGESBy Kris Christen
MODELING
ECOSYSTEM HEALTH THE
GREAT PLAINS PRAIRIE CLUSTER RETURN
ENGAGEMENT
Staff Citings
ERODING VALUES
A new training program and manual address construction-site erosion and sedimentation—the leading causes of water-quality impairment in Tennessee.
By Kris Christen
New road-building projects and the development of large subdivisions and industrial parks are devouring Tennessee’s forests and fields, and the soil and debris draining from construction sites during heavy rains is devastating the state’s aquatic ecosystems. In fact, a look at the state’s list of polluted streams, rivers, and lakes points to sedimentation as the leading cause of water-quality impairment.
“We’re one of the fastest growing states in the Southeast, with some of our counties rivaling Atlanta in terms of growth,” says Tim Gangaware, associate director of the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Water Resources Research Center (WRRC). Tennessee’s biggest cities—Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville—and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) have had policies in place since the mid-1990s to control stormwater discharges flowing from construction sites, parking lots, and other urban and industrial properties, Gangaware says, but the problem continues to worsen.
In response, Gangaware and John Buchanan, an assistant professor in UT’s biosystems engineering and environmental science department, are working with TDEC to develop a training program on erosion prevention and sediment control for the construction industry. The program could soon become mandatory statewide.
CURRENT REGULATIONS
Stormwater runoff falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), which TDEC administers. The regulation requires the implementation of stormwater programs across the state. In addition, developers who plan to disturb more than five acres of land must apply for permits. Developers are required to outline specific stormwater pollution-prevention plans, listing the measures—known as best management practices (BMPs)—they will implement to confine any bared soils to the construction site.
More than 80 additional Tennessee communities and counties will have to establish similar programs under EPA’s new stormwater requirements, which take effect in March 2003. The new permits will be required for any site larger than one acre, which, Gangaware says, should cover nearly all construction activity.
While these measures look good on paper, few developers actually follow through on the BMPs contained in their plans. And when they do, they’re often not installing erosion-control devices properly, Gangaware says.
Compounding the problem is a lack of resources at the state and local levels for enforcing permit requirements, meaning that onsite inspections are strictly complaint-driven, admits Paul Schmierbach, an environmental program manager with TDEC. Schmierbach says he has only three inspectors to cover 16 counties, “and they also participate in our water-sampling program as well, so they are completely overwhelmed.”
ENTER UT
To bring more construction sites into compliance with federal and state requirements and to stem the sediment loads to streams, TDEC and the larger municipalities called on UT. The university responded by developing a certification training course for everyone involved in land-disturbing activities—including developers and contractors, engineers, those drafting and reviewing stormwater plans, and inspection and enforcement personnel.
Some cities, Chattanooga among them, had developed their own training courses on sediment control. But as individual cities began to draft their own courses, “it quickly became apparent that a contractor who did business in several areas around the state could wind up having to pass a training program in each of those cities,” says Doug Fritz, water-quality coordinator with Chattanooga’s stormwater management team. “We kept pressuring the state for a course that would be good whether the developer’s in Cookeville, Jackson, or Chattanooga.”
The result: Since June 2001, TDEC has offered a stormwater fundamentals course targeting the people on construction sites who are responsible for installing such sediment-control devices as the ubiquitous black silt fences—which are probably the most misused BMP, according to Gangaware.
“In the course, we’re telling participants what’s expected of them, how to properly install and maintain sediment controls, and what to do if these controls don’t work,” Gangaware says. Topics covered include the impact of erosion on Tennessee’s natural resources, the role of state agencies and local officials involved with erosion and sediment control and how they interact, the NPDES construction stormwater permitting process, the erosion process and hydrologic cycle, and the most effective vegetative and structural erosion and sediment controls.
These BMPs run the gamut from silt fences to buffer strips to mattings to sediment ponds. “No one BMP will address all problems,” Gangaware says. “The course preaches that multiple BMPs in the right places are necessary to keep eroded material from leaving the site.”
And that’s the key issue, notes Buchanan, who teaches the BMP part of the course. “You’re not fined until soil leaves your site,” he says, “But if you don’t have erosion in the first place, sediment control takes care of itself.”
If exposed soils are reseeded with grass or kept covered with mattings, straw, or wood chips, says Buchanan, “you break up a lot of the energy that’s in a raindrop, so you won’t have as much erosion taking place.”
At the end of the course, participants must pass an exam to receive certificates of completion.
A second-level course ready for pilot testing entails a more intensive curriculum, especially for engineers, landscape architects, and even site inspectors, on the design of stormwater plans.
Currently, “you’ve got people designing sediment- and erosion-control plans who don’t really know what they’re designing for,” Gangaware says. “A lot of times, the guys installing these BMPs are saying, ‘well, we put it in exactly the way the engineer drew it up, but it just won’t work.’”
Specialty courses slated for future development include “how to conduct site inspections” and “state-of-the-art techniques,” which would include effective ground covers, the best grass seed, and the best combination of grass seed and native plants.
GETTING TOUGH ON VIOLATORS
Ultimately, course certification may be required before developers can obtain construction permits. Discussions are ongoing between TDEC and municipalities for doing just that, a move the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) would support, says Dennis Cook, TDOT’s assistant chief engineer for planning. TDOT is one of the state’s biggest developers, and at any given time, the agency is involved with about 700 projects representing a billion dollars worth of road construction.
TDOT has put up $80,000 for development of the course, Cook says, because “we think it’s critical. Our designers and project developers need to understand the tools and techniques necessary to minimize erosion and pollution.”
Meanwhile, Nashville passed a certification requirement effective June 2002, and Knoxville and Memphis are talking about following suit.
“We went ahead and made certification our policy because,
when we looked at how sites were being managed, it became apparent that folks
didn’t have the understanding or knowledge to make good onsite decisions,”
says Michael Hunt, technical services coordinator for Nashville’s Metro
Department of Water Services Stormwater Division.
***
For information contact Tim Gangaware, WRRC, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-2151.
VISITING SCIENTIST CONTRIBUTES TO CEB RESEARCH
By Kris Christen
Rakesh Gupta, a visiting scientist from India, has developed a new biosensor for detecting endocrine-disrupting contaminants in the environment. The sensor is a spin-off of the Bioluminescent Bioreporter Integrated Circuits (BBICs) developed by the University of Tennessee’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The new biosensor has significant potential for use in the screening of drugs and chemicals, as well as in the remote sensing of estrogenic compounds in the environment.
BBICs are made up of bioluminescent microorganisms, combined with tiny computer chips, that emit light whenever they come into contact with the specific chemical or biological agent they were engineered to detect. The light signal they produce is directly proportional to the concentration level of the agent to which they have been exposed, enabling researchers to pinpoint a contaminant’s precise location in the environment and the concentrations that are present. So far, CEB scientists have developed a number of bacteria-based bioreporters capable of detecting a wide variety of contaminants ranging from aromatic hydrocarbons to heavy metals to polychlorinated biphenyls.
Gupta, however, has developed a yeast bioluminescent bioreporter, something several leading scientists had said couldn’t be done. The particular organism he has genetically modified is called Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as baker’s yeast.
“His work has been very significant both for us and the scientific community,” because Gupta’s accomplishment “has debunked a previously held theory that you couldn’t make yeast bioluminescent the way we’ve done it here,” says Gary Sayler, CEB’s director. Moreover, it represents a major step forward in environmental research because “believe it or not, yeast is much more closely related genetically to humans than bacteria are,” Sayler says. Consequently, the bioluminescent assays for endocrine disrupters in yeast will give scientists a much better understanding in terms of whether a particular contaminant will have any effects on humans.
Although other bioassays exist for detecting estrogenic compounds in the environment, the big advantage of Gupta’s sensor is that it provides a much more sensitive, rapid, and substrate-free assay than the other techniques.
“I can get my response results within five to six hours, and it’s an on-line, real-time assay,” Gupta says. All that’s required to collect data is to put the receptor organisms on the chip and place the device out into the environment.
Having returned in November to his post as assistant
professor at the University of Delhi in his native India, Gupta says he will use
the new bioreporter for testing the levels of estrogens present in nearby creeks
and rivers. “Pollution levels are very high in India, particularly in the main
rivers,” he notes. He also plans to return to CEB next year to extend his work
into the development of a bioluminescent yeast bioreporter for detecting dioxins
and arsenic, the latter of which poisons many groundwater wells in East India.
***
For more information contact Gary Sayler, CEB, The University of Tennessee, 676 Dabney Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996-1605, or call 865-974-8080.
MIDDLE EASTERN EXCHANGES
The University of Tennessee’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB) is also collaborating with another visiting scientist, Esmaeil AlSaleh, who arrived from Kuwait in October. (See related story, “Visiting Scientist Contributes to CEB Research,” on this page.)
AlSaleh, who is working to develop a new biosensor for detecting carcinogenic compounds associated with petroleum products, represents what CEB hopes will be a prolonged exchange with Middle Eastern environmental scientists, says Gary Sayler, CEB’s director.
An assistant professor from the University of Kuwait, AlSaleh has an extensive background in the bioremediation of sites contaminated by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
“In Kuwait, we have oil spill problems all the time, and, using the molecular biology of bacteria, we’re trying to find the best solutions for cleaning up our environment,” AlSaleh says.
“We’d like to know exactly what hydrocarbons exist and in what concentrations,” he says, adding that other toxic materials—such as heavy metals and pesticides—are sometimes present in the environment, inhibiting bacterial activity from degrading hydrocarbons.
Hence his goal during his time at CEB is to insert a bioluminescent gene into one of the bacteria previously isolated by CEB researchers from a PAH-contaminated site to detect benzo(a)pyrene—a persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemical. “We’re trying to construct a bioreporter that can detect this compound in basically any environmental sample,” AlSaleh says.
In later applications of the technology back in Kuwait, AlSaleh says he expects the bioreporters to help him and his colleagues determine whether higher or lower rates of bioremediation are occurring and why, so that cleanup projects can be modified to enhance microbial activity.
—Kris Christen
MODELING ECOSYSTEM
HEALTH
Aquatic
and terrestrial ecosystem models will help the National Park Service choose
reliable indicators for predicting ecological health and change.
By Kris Christen
How do you know when a particular ecosystem has been so altered that some communities of organisms have been pushed to the brink? And what kinds of indicators might give you the best clues about the overall health of such an ecosystem? Is it the bugs living in and around streams? Might it be the water quality of the streams themselves, or perhaps the quality of the air drifting overhead? And once such indicators are identified, how might they be monitored to discern possible trends?
These are just a few of the questions researchers are grappling with under a National Park Service (NPS) initiative to develop long-term ecological monitoring programs for each of the 270 parks nationwide that fall under the agency’s jurisdiction. This program, dubbed Vital Signs, is an attempt to identify key indications of ecosystem health and establish relatively easy and inexpensive monitoring techniques, given the limited budgets of these parks.
“Just like with human health where you use temperature and blood pressure to help you diagnose where there might be a problem, we’re trying to find these vital signs for ecological health that might indicate an early warning of something going wrong,” says Jack Ranney, an ecologist with the University of Tennessee’s Energy, Environment, and Resources Center.
Until now, pollution standards have primarily been geared toward human health, under the assumption that if human health is taken care of, everything else will be okay, Ranney says. “But that’s not proving true in the environment.” In addition, many threats—such as invasive species and air and water pollution—originate outside park boundaries, “so, for policy reasons, we need to clarify the status of the parks’ natural resources.”
AGENTS OF CHANGE
The Vital Signs program zeros in on an ecosystem in a three-step process—identifying critical stressors that cause change, determining the ecological responses to these stressors, and establishing good protocols for sampling, explains Ranney, whose specialties encompass systems ecology and monitoring methods. He is currently assisting two NPS networks—the Cumberland Piedmont Network and Appalachian Highlands Network—in the first phase, developing models for the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems that exist in their areas.
The NPS grouped its parks into 32 networks (see map) to make the process more efficient, enabling them to share information and financial resources, as well as allowing the parks to look at themselves on a more regional scale. Network assignment has been made on the basis of ecological similarity and geographic proximity.
“This is a new way of doing things, to…figure out what issues might be overlapping among the parks,” says Robert Emmott, inventory and monitoring coordinator for the Appalachian Highlands Network, which includes the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, Obed Wild and Scenic River, Blue Ridge Parkway, and Appalachian Trail Park Office. Fourteen other parks—namely Mammoth Cave National Park, and a number of historic battlefield and national monument sites located in seven southeastern states—are grouped under the Cumberland Piedmont Network. Both networks are working together to develop an overall regional monitoring program.
The models will describe what is currently known about the parks and how they function, says Steve Thomas, Long-term Ecological Monitoring (LTEM) coordinator for the Mammoth Cave park. The LTEM program at Mammoth Cave National Park includes development of models for cave and karst ecosystems, along with participation in the terrestrial and aquatic systems monitoring efforts of the Appalachian Highlands and Cumberland Piedmont networks.
According to Ranney, some of the primary ecosystem stressors include climate change, severely depressed air quality, major changes in land use adjacent to the parks, degraded water quality and altered water quantity, rapidly increasing numbers of invasive plants and pathogens, and inappropriate recreational activity. These stressors, in turn, may affect any number of changes, ranging from increased ozone levels and higher amounts of atmospheric deposition to altered soil composition, erosion rates, and nutrient cycling to changes in stream hydrology affecting both water quality and quantity.
PICKING THE RIGHT INDICATORS
Once these stressors have all been mapped out, “we’ll identify various indicators of such changes, and how we might go about monitoring these,” Ranney says. “At this point, we’re making a list of what we believe are the most important.” The list of some 30 indicators so far includes impermeable land surface area, changes in species population and diversity, numbers and distribution of invasive exotic species, biogeochemical cycles, various air- and water-quality parameters, and storm severity, frequency, and timing. Ultimately, however, because of limited funds and personnel, the parks will have to pare the list to a dozen or so indicators.
“It’s a very difficult challenge, because there’s so much variability in the natural world, and you want to pick things that indicate both ecosystem health and potential threats…that also have known relationships either to ecosystem health or stressors on the ecosystem,” Emmott says.
According to Thomas, once the modeling is complete the next step is to overlay the models with management issues and concerns specific to various parks. “We need to think about the best places in the model that we could monitor over the long term to give us answers to the questions that managers are asking,” Thomas says. Managers would use the resulting scientific information to make decisions on how to manage the park, as well as to assess management efforts and ecosystem health.
Finally, once the parks have identified what they’re going to monitor, comes the step of figuring out how to do it—namely developing protocols, Thomas says. “We need to find the best protocol or method that will give us the information we need most reliably and consistently and for the cheapest price, and then put it in place and actually start monitoring. The Cumberland Piedmont and Appalachian Highlands Networks hope to be at the monitoring stage by April 2004.
BIGGEST HURDLES
One of the biggest challenges of this exercise is the lack of knowledge on how ecosystems function. “We’re working from an expert’s best guess in a lot of areas,” Ranney admits. “We know there’s a lot of acidification and nutrient loss in the high elevation forests in the Smokies, where many of the trees have succumbed to other stresses such as pests and diseases. But what about the mid-elevation areas that have only a moderate amount of buffering capacity? Nobody knows what’s going on there.” Good maps do not exist of pest plant invasions, and scientists know very little about the effects pest plants have on an ecosystem, Ranney adds.
Another big difficulty is personal biases. “Everyone has pet interests and agendas,” Thomas says. “We all need to be willing to give up our particular specialties and try to think about what’s best for overall ecosystem health and the goals we’re trying to achieve with this program. It may be that someone’s particular species of interest doesn’t get monitored, and they need to be willing to accept that.”
EFFECTING POLICY CHANGES
Ultimately, the researchers say they hope the modeling exercise will offer a more systematic approach to monitoring, providing them with more trends data, as well as more leverage in dealing with policy questions at the local, state, regional, and perhaps federal levels.
“We’ll have possible management actions that we can take inside the park to try and address, but we have less control over other things such as emissions from coal-fired power plants that are dropping either mercury or acid rain into the park or point source pollutants getting into the water,” Thomas says.
According to Ranney and Emmott, the new data will result in
more quality data across a larger number of parks, which could favorably
influence future policy and permitting decisions.
***
For more information contact Jack
Ranney, Energy, Environment and Resources Center, 311 Conference Center
Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-3938.
THE GREAT PLAINS
PRAIRIE CLUSTER
One National Park Service (NPS) network that’s already been through the whole Vital Signs exercise is the Great Plains Prairie Cluster Network, which the agency established as a prototype to conduct monitoring for a group of small parks.
This network got underway in 1990, “and we’re just now getting to the point of having a good baseline of information in all the parks where we work”—namely six parks widely disbursed throughout the Midwest—says Lisa Thomas, an ecologist and prototype-monitoring program manager.
But the short-term benefits have also been numerous. “We’re finding some species we didn’t know we had in the parks, as well as species we haven’t seen for awhile,” she notes. Vegetation mapping also helped them to key in on unique habitats such as gravel washes that had slipped through the cracks before.
“There are a number of rare species that rely on disturbances associated with periodic flooding,” Thomas says, adding that the result of this information has been better decision making by park managers. When planning trails, for example, they’re able to avoid sensitive areas, rather than mitigating after the fact.
Another result of the Vital Signs program has been more emphasis on high quality data as opposed to quantity, Thomas notes. “We really want people to be able to use these data 30 to 50 years from now,” and this means paying more attention to how they’re collected, entered into a database, and archived.
—Kris Christen
RETURN ENGAGEMENT
The
only salmonid native to the Smokies, the brook trout is being restored to some
of its historic range.
By Elise LeQuire
Editor’s Note: Each issue of InSites features an article from Sightline, a semiannual publication that focuses on the environmental health of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Sightline is a collaborative effort among the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Energy, Environment and Resources Center; Great Smoky Mountains National Park; Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association. The following article appears in the fall/winter edition of the publication. To receive a free copy of Sightline, contact Constance Griffith at cbgriffith@utk.edu or 865-974-1156.
Like many species in the Southern Appalachians, the brook trout weathered the Pleistocene glaciation, as the saber-toothed tiger and woolly mastodon became extinct and humans began to dominate Earth. In the modern era, however, human pressures have reduced the historic range of Salvelinus fontinalis, a typically freshwater member of the Salmonidae family that includes salmon, true trout, and char such as brook trout.
As the only trout native to the region, the Southern
Appalachian brook trout historically thrived in cool, clear streams from
southwestern Virginia to northern Georgia at elevations between 1,700 and 4,500
feet. The brookies, also known as speckled trout by locals, prefer stream
temperatures between 40 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but can briefly tolerate
temperatures as cold as 32 or as warm as 77 degrees. Though they evolved to
withstand the slightly more acidic conditions of upper-elevation streams, acid
deposition from combustion of fossil fuels is altering stream chemistry. In
addition, introduced rainbow and brown trout have displaced the brook trout in
much of its natural range.
Stock Answers
A century ago, extensive logging and fires had destroyed much of the forest canopy that kept streams cool, which reduced the brookies’ original range by 50 percent. Afterward, the brook trout could be found only upstream of where logging activities had occurred. Stocking streams then with species such as rainbow trout native to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Western states and brown trout native to northern Europe seemed like a good idea. The introduced species, generally longer-lived than brook trout and growing to larger sizes, filled a niche in the warmer reaches of mountain streams.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was in charge of fisheries maintenance at that time, and the National Park Service (NPS) saw no harm in stocking streams within Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP). Surveys during the early 1980s, however, showed that an additional 50 percent of the range occupied exclusively by brook trout had been lost since the Park was established and logging ceased.
Today, an informed experiment is underway to restore the native, southern strain of S. fontinalis to some of its historical range within the Park. “This is a really complicated process,” says Steve Moore, supervisory fishery biologist with NPS. “We are refining our work to provide managers with good information to guide the decision-making process.”
Choose Your Poison
A pilot project in Sams Creek, in the Middle Prong of the Little River watershed, is a case in point. Like many streams in GSMNP, Sams Creek is home to a remnant population of brook trout. Until summer 2001, the creek also harbored rainbow trout. The plan was to remove the rainbows and restore the brookies. To that end, Park biologists considered several strategies.
One option, electroshocking, has been used in the Park for over 20 years in small streams. Biologists temporarily stun all the fish in the treatment area. When the fish float to the top, the introduced species are removed from the stream and the brook trout returned to the stream. Although electroshocking has little effect on other aquatic species, it doesn’t remove 100 percent of the non-native trout and is extremely labor-intensive. The process must be repeated several times in a year to achieve even a 75-percent reduction in selected fish populations, in part because fish lurking under rocks and in deep pools may escape the shock and live to spawn again.
Another option was really no option: Biologists could leave the stream alone and see what nature would do. The problem here, says Moore, is that “the Park Service has a mandate to protect naturally functioning ecosystems.”
Finally, they considered poisons, or piscicides, that are approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for use in reintroduction efforts; unfortunately, such poisons also kill other species, including aquatic insects such as mayflies and caddis flies, staples of the brook trout’s diet.
An assessment of two piscicides, antimycin—a class of antibiotic that blocks cellular respiration—and Rotenone, revealed that antimycin has fewer adverse impacts on species other than fish, is more effective in cooler water, and is easier to neutralize after treatment.
Some researchers voiced concern about a certain caddis fly, Neophylax kolodskii, discovered in 1987, that was new to taxonomists. If Sams Creek were the only habitat for this insect, NPS would abandon its plan to restore brook trout to the stream. In the past two years, however, an extensive search revealed that the insect, though hard to find, lives both inside and outside the treatment area and should repopulate the stream naturally.
The Park Service ultimately settled on a combination of electroshocking and poisoning. In the summer of 2001, Park biologists and volunteers electrofished Sams Creek, moved the brook trout upstream, and applied lethal doses of antimycin to about four kilometers, or two and a half miles, of the stream—at an elevation of 2,000 feet and upstream of a waterfall that would serve as a barrier to introduced trout.
Post-treatment monitoring of fish found no evidence of surviving rainbow trout. Moreover, the survival rate of aquatic insects was better than expected, indicating that antimycin is a safe chemical to use in reintroduction projects. “We found populations reduced by only 40 to 50 percent. And four months later, we found more aquatic insects in the creek than before,” Moore says, in part because there were fewer fish to eat them.
Dry Spell
A year after treatment, the brook trout are returning to Sams Creek, with a little human help. The hope was that brook trout would naturally migrate downstream to the treated area, but an extended three- to four-year drought eliminated half the fish population. “Brook trout haven’t moved down from headwaters as anticipated,” Moore says. “The fish that have moved down are the ones that spawned out last year, so the small ones get displaced first, but they don’t move much over half a mile.”
In July 2002, biologists collected 150 Southern Appalachian brook trout in the Little River watershed and carried them overland to Sams Creek. Although biologists prefer to let the brookies repopulate on their own, “we want to get the stream repopulated as fast as we can,” Moore says. “I want to let the resident fish do as much as possible, so repopulation will be a little bit slow.”
After collecting the brookies, biologists tested them to ensure that they are the true race of Southern Appalachian trout.
Hatchery stocks of brook trout descend from populations in the northeastern United States; there are no domesticated stocks of Southern Appalachian origin. “The northern strain is genetically different from the southern race,” says Peter Galbreath, director of the Mountain Aquaculture Research Center at Western Carolina University.
Galbreath has collaborated with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, the U.S. Forest Service, and Trout Unlimited over the past few years to determine the genetic origin of wild brook trout populations in North Carolina. “In cases where hatchery brook trout interbreed with native Southern Appalachian brook trout, a population of mixed genetic origin results, which is forever altered from the genetic nature of either the original native population or the hatchery stock,” Galbreath says.
The distinction between strains is not easily detectable to the human eye, though the Southern Appalachian strain may tend to have a relatively larger head. The difference, however, is not definitive, according to genetic research conducted on brook trout in the Park by Stanley Z. Guffey, a lecturer in the Division of Biology at the University of Tennessee. In any event, the difference is obvious at the biochemical level by protein or DNA analysis. “We would not move fish if we weren’t certain of the genetic background,” Moore says.
Sams Creek is one of 11 streams in the Park where brook trout restoration projects are underway. So far, non-native trout have been removed and brookies restored in 10 to 11 miles of stream. “We have surveyed about 100 miles of stream and restored 10 percent of brook trout within its historical range,” Moore says.
Eventually, as the population rebounds, Sams Creek may be open for fishing. For now, it remains an experimental test site off-limits to anglers. However, in July 2002 the Park Service announced the reopening of eight GSMNP streams to brook trout fishing.
Threatening Skies
The restoration of the brook trout is just one phase of a long-term Park-wide effort to determine the range, health, and variation in natural populations of all aquatic wildlife. “We’re also looking at water chemistry, especially acid deposition, to see how that is affecting fish populations,” Moore says.
Though brook trout have evolved to withstand higher levels
of acidity than other species, they do not thrive when pH drops below 5.6.
Because some upper-elevation Southern Appalachian streams receive high levels of
acid deposition, they become acidic enough to stress young fish and approach the
lower limit for trout viability. In fact, while these reintroduction efforts are
a positive step toward preserving the Southern Appalachian region’s only
native trout, Park biologists maintain that continued acidification of mountain
streams from fossil-fuel combustion will likely remain a greater threat than
competition from introduced trout and the sport of angling.
***
For more information contact Bob Miller, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 107 Park Headquarters Road, Gatlinburg, TN 37738, or call 865-436-1207.
Collaborations. To protect threatened and endangered species and stream-side habitats from invasive pest plants in the southern Appalachian region, the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) is conducting a series of workshops in cooperation with SAMAB (Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere), the National Forest Foundation, the Appalachian Trail Park Office, and the Tennessee Exotic Pest Plant Council, along with several government agencies and communities. Jack Ranney, a research ecologist with WMREI-affiliate the Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC), is helping coordinate the workshops and training volunteers to identify, inventory, and control pest plants. Their findings, which will be posted on the Internet, will give communities access to information about controlling pest plants and developing appropriate ordinances.
Under the auspices of EERC’s Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies, Research Scientist Don Huisingh is helping Monterrey Tech University (Monterrey, Mexico), implement sustainable development (SD) throughout its program and across its 34-campus network. Huisingh and Francisco J. Lozano-García, a colleague at Monterrey, coordinate efforts to weave SD concepts into Monterrey Tech’s courses and ensure that disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, as well as campus physical facilities, adhere to SD criteria.
Projects. David Feldman, an EERC senior research scientist, recently served as keynote speaker for Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West, at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. Feldman’s address was titled "Covenants, Categorical Imperatives, and Stewardship Ethics: Are There Sound Alternatives to Utilitarianism for River Basin Management?" The Arizona Humanities Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored the conference. Feldman also convened a panel, "The State of Affairs: Challenges Facing Southeast and Gulf States in the 21st Century," as part of When the Water Runs Dry: Maintaining a Balance between Human Water Use and Environmental Needs. This conference, held in New Orleans, was sponsored by the Mott and Turner foundations and EPA Gulf of Mexico Program. Feldman and graduate student Lyndsay Moseley (Political Science) also presented "Faith-based Environmental Initiatives in Southern Appalachia," at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Boston.
A new Campus Recycling Committee has been formed at the
direction of University of Tennessee Provost Loren
Crabtree and Vice President Phil
Scheurer. EERC’s Executive Director, Jack
Barkenbus, and Student Intern Sarah
Surak (Political Science) were chosen to serve as co-chairs of the
committee, which is tasked with recommending an expanded campus recycling
system. Senior Research Associate Catherine
Wilt, former president of the National Recycling Coalition, is also a key
member of the committee.
