By: Philip Gilbert

Shuffling around in a shallow stream in a rhythmic minute-long, square-meter, “Mr. Blue Sky” frenzy, I am a peculiar blur to post-work Tuesday commuters… and I am not crazy. I reassure myself of this—hair thrashing, molars flashing.

These are the tree-lined streets and winding creeks I’ve come to know personally and professionally. In some places of this parceled suburban matrix, it’s hard to feign amazement at water’s defiance of boundaries. Yet, this audacity emerges elsewhere only in torrential blips on a precipitation record. It is surely more often us humans who have transgressed boundaries.

Fortunately for me, this disconnection from the water cycle has dried out. On a stormy day, I watch the water flow down the tree trunks, pavement, and hillsides, infusing this trickling landscape with its lifeblood. On a sunny day, I find myself here, in the creeks, studying.

Me, during a riparian vegetation survey of a predominantly forested study site

Inspired by the variance in land cover/use of this suburban watershed, and enabled by the Wrigley Institute’s Environmental Award program, my childhood stomping grounds became my workplace.

My current research project assesses the impact of land cover/use composition within subwatersheds on the bio-integrity of related tributaries. Using abiotic water quality data, sampling of macroinvertebrate assemblages, and field surveys and GIS analysis of riparian buffers, I am exploring the relationships between dominant land use/cover types (commercial, residential, forested, and agricultural) and stream ecosystem health.

An Appalachian brook crayfish (Cambarus bartonii) (left) and my field assistant (Homo jillius) holding a minnow (sp. unknown) (right).

Though the data analysis is ongoing and will need to be supplemented with annual datasets, I have established a baseline data-driven profile of my hometown waterways, which will help direct local stream stewardship and refine my conceptualization of future landscape-scale watershed practices.

This research and my studies at USC have emphasized the importance of investigating watersheds spatially, socially, and temporally, as complex, modelable systems. This framework strives for what is necessary for policy-backed change. Though, a certain poetry is missing.

Too often, we are removed from the water cycle, and when we are not, we act towards containment, contamination, and commodification. This may not always be the case, but the actions of few cannot replace the actions of many. Such disconnection demands a reckoning with and recertification of cultural values. We must become fluent in the poetry of the watershed.

In these meandering intact riparian corridors, a mystical timelessness sanctifies the seaward flow. An awareness of woodland lucidity takes root: to control is not to value. Rather, exhibiting self-control, seeking understanding, and extending belonging are invaluable actions, key to our future in this hydrosphere.

Habitat heterogeneity along and within well-buffered first-order streams.

Summer Award made possible by the Bauer Family Endowed Scholarship Fund. 

By: Montana Denton

Hi, I’m Montana! I’m a senior in the Environmental Studies program at USC. This summer, I had the opportunity to be a part of two very different research experiences through the Wrigley Institute, funded by the institute’s Environmental Summer Awards.

Hard at work pouring some culture into a sample test tube without spilling!

Going into my final year of undergrad, I was feeling lost — one of the coolest parts of my major is all the hands-on and field opportunities that we get and like everyone else, I felt like I’d missed out on a lot due to COVID. I’m super grateful for both research opportunities that I was able to participate in this summer. I gained valuable hands-on experience, mentorship, and some of the clarity that I felt like I was missing as I prepare for the real world (yikes!).

The first research opportunity that I participated in was assisting Environmental Studies Professor Victoria Campbell-Arvai in social science research. She had several projects going on simultaneously, and I was able to learn skills like qualitative data coding and analysis, statistical analysis of quantitative data sets, and systematic literature reviews. The context of the research varied week to week, covering areas from carbon capture utilization to urban forests, but it was a fantastic way to build some very important environmental analysis skills.

The social science perspective was one that I hadn’t really explored in much detail, and it was interesting to look at focus group responses and data to identify public perception and understanding of various environmental issues and innovation being implemented to solve them.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to be a research assistant in the Hutchins lab on campus. I assisted a PhD candidate with her work on phytoplankton responses to changing ocean chemistry. I had absolutely zero experience in this area, but over the past several months I gained a lot of knowledge and lab skills.

We focused our research on a local harmful algal bloom species: the toxic Alexandrium dinoflagellate. Increased amounts of nutrients in the water can often yield ideal conditions for harmful algal blooms of toxic dinoflagellates, and the frequency of these blooms off the West Coast of the U.S. have been increasing in recent decades due to climate change.

Our experiment was designed to simulate a changing ocean environment — anthropogenic-induced climate change is causing the ocean to get warmer and have fluctuating levels of nutrients and marine life will be directly affected. The goal of the experiment was to measure how the growth rates and toxin production of the Alexandrium cultures change when exposed to various temperatures and nutrient concentrations.

An overhead shot at one of the thermal blocks from my project in the lab. Cultures (samples identified by colorful labels) were exposed to increasing levels of heat and light. We are currently expanding the project to two thermal blocks, both of which will now feature cultures that have been treated with varying levels of nitrogen and phosphorus.

We set up a temperature gradient (from 16 to 26°C) using a thermal block and varied both the light received. Within each temperature treatment, cultures were grown under 3 different nutrient concentrations: replete (all essential macronutrients available), nitrate limited, and phosphate limited.

Preparing our cultures for in vivo testing! Several times a week, we remove all the cultures from the thermal block and rearrange them under a sterile lab hood. I pour a sample of each culture into a test tube where I run it through a fluorometer to test for the amount of chlorophyll in the sample. We then use the measurements to calculate the growth rate of our cultures.

Some of my biggest takeaways from this summer:

1. Try new things! I always considered myself a right-brained person, but I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed working in the lab and analyzing data.

2. Being inexperienced is a good thing — yes, there was a steep learning curve when it came to lab protocols and utilizing functions in Excel, but I asked questions and got so much out of it. I’ll be honest, I had no idea what I was doing at first, but by the end of the summer I was working independently on both my projects, and even took care of the phytoplankton cultures by myself for a week!

3. No one has it all figured out! Going into my last year of college is — to be completely honest — terrifying. I’ve been a full-time student for the past 16 years of my life, and the slow preparation for the real world is scary!

I still don’t have a concrete plan for what I want to do after I graduate, but this summer was a wonderful way to talk to people in many different realms of environmental science, and it opened my eyes to a lot of career options that I hadn’t previously considered.