Environmental Impact Assessment

For the first weekly post of the new schedule (Thursdays now), I want to talk about work that I did last week and that strongly frames the work that we do in our lab. Last Wednesday, Dr. Ingels, our intern Chenoah, and myself went out and sampled from the Econfina River (pictured left) here in North Florida, and on Tuesday they sampled the Fenholloway River. The Fenholloway River represents an extremely polluted area; the Fenholloway paper mill has been dumping paper mill waste into the river and caused the state of Florida to classify the river as industrial. A cleanup project that has been ongoing claims that the river is now fishable-swimmable, which represents a major step up. However, water quality and sediment quality are very different metrics, since any pollutants that start in the water column will eventually sink to the sediment. The Enconfina River, however, runs nearly parallel to the Fenholloway, 15 km away, and represents similar, yet unpolluted conditions.

The work that we were in the field doing was largely for an environmental impact assessment. When industries propose construction or a development of sorts, an EIA is done so that stakeholders from the community, government, and private investors understand the risks of the project with regards to economic risks, potential health effects, etc. For our lab, we use information about the meiofauna taxa that are present and their abundances to determine how healthy the environment is. Specifically, nematodes respond differently to different types of pollution (see Ridall & Ingels, 2021 for more information), so we can use the data to support that an area is highly polluted [or not]. For example, nematodes are generally classified into colonizers and persisters, based on how tolerant they are to pollution: colonizers are rather tolerant to pollution and will be found in high abundances in polluted areas, while persisters are not tolerant to pollution and live where pollution levels are low. This information alone gives an understanding about the general status of the environment. Then, ratios between certain meiofauna can give us even more information, and we can couple all those data with biogeochemistry data to make a multi-faceted conclusion about the environmental quality.

The United States has different environmental quality standards than other places in the world and uses different metrics to track environmental health. In Europe, researchers have added nematode metrics to environmental quality status assessments, which hopefully will encourage nematode bioindication metrics in United States' environmental assessments. In the future, I assume that nematology and meiobenthology will become more fundamental fields in environmental sciences and encourage young individuals to pursue these fields, and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for these areas of science.

A big thank you to Dr. Ingels for bringing me on the trip--it was a great time that was much less physically taxing than my work can be and a great opportunity to participate in more environmental assessment work.

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