Capacitación en gestión del agua y humedales en diferentes sectores sociales: comunidades rurales, gobierno y academia - Water management in a karstic rural impoverished environment
Researchers: Dr. Marinus L. Otte (North Dakota State University) and Dr. Tatiana Lobato de Magalhães (Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro)
This project is about improving water availability and quality in the Sierra Gorda mountains in the state of Querétaro in Mexico. See https://uaqfulbrightspecialist.weebly.com/.
Wetlands for reduction of sediment and nutrient loadings in impaired watersheds
Researchers: Dr. Marinus L. Otte (PI), Dr. Xuefeng (Michael) Chu, and PhD students Kyle Boutin, Tiansong Qi and Mosammat (Mustari) Khanaum
This is a collaboration between Otte and Boutin in the Department of Biological Sciences and Chu, Qi and Khanaum in Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at North Dakota State University. The aim is to assess how much area of wetlands would be needed to reduce sediment/nutrient loads (‘loads’) to below acceptable levels in impaired watersheds in North Dakota, initially without taking any limiting factors (e.g. legal considerations, land uses, ownership) into consideration. The NDDEQ has identified several small 303(d)-listed watersheds and inclusion of wetlands for remediation has high priority. We will select some of the impaired watersheds and use existing databases and modeling to assess the efficacy of incorporating wetlands (restoration and new construction) under different scenarios into remediation. The first two years will focus on developing models, while the third year will be used to assess feasibility taking existing constraints into account. We expect that significant increases in wetland area will be needed in each watershed to obtain lower loads, as well as changes to land uses adjacent to streams and wetlands.
Assessment of Ecosystem Services of Restored Prairie Pothole Wetlands as Function of Time since Restoration
Researchers: Marinus Otte, Jon Sweetman, Yuxiang Yuan, Whitney Sauskojus, Christine Cornish
The objective is to assess success of restoration of PPR wetlands in terms of ecosystem services in relation to time since restoration. Our past research has shown that restored wetlands differ from natural wetlands in biogeochemistry. In the proposed study we will assess biogeochemistry, vegetation and invertebrates as measures of ecosystem services. We expect that organic matter (OM) content and OM-bound element concentrations will be lower, other elements higher, and vegetation and invertebrate density, diversity and functional traits to be lower than that of natural wetlands. We expect older restored wetlands to be more like natural wetlands than younger ones.
