Wetlands, water quality in Chesapeake Bay focus of Van Meter NSF CAREER Award

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — From improving water quality to providing a haven for endangered species, wetlands are the unsung heroes of our planet. Wetlands provide a range of critical services, like reducing storm damage and removing excess nutrients, and are among the most productive ecosystems in the world. Kimberly Van Meter, assistant professor of geography, received a $644,595 Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the role of wetlands in improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay region.

For many years, the bay has faced significant water quality issues due to nutrient runoff. Excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus flow into the bay through rivers and streams, leading to a decline in water quality. In recent years, there has been increased interest in wetland restoration as a tool to improve water quality, according to Van Meter.

“Unfortunately, our understanding of how to optimize the placement and function of restored wetlands to improve water quality remains limited,” said Van Meter. “The primary objective of this research project is to gain a better understanding of controls on fluxes of landscape nitrogen to current and restorable wetland sites and, thus, to better predict the contributions of wetlands to water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.”

Wetlands play a key role in maintaining and improving water quality by acting as filtering systems by removing sediment, nutrients and pollutants, Van Meter said.

“Wetlands are great in and of themselves, but the fantastic thing is the water purification role they play,” said Van Meter. “Think of contaminated water flowing into a wetland. That water will sit there instead of just flowing off into the river system where it's going to go downstream to the coast. It sits there and there's time for chemical reactions to take place. They hold on or retain those nutrients and then keep them out of the downstream water supply.”

A critical step of wetland restoration is deciding where to place them. Van Meter is interested in identifying areas where wetland restoration efforts can have the greatest impact on water quality.

“I've done some previous work showing that even a 10% increase in wetland area could take us a very long way towards improving water quality,” said Van Meter. “One of the things that I really focus on in my work is how to better target the restoration projects that we do. As much as we know about hydrology, we still don't totally understand how wetlands are connected with the surrounding landscape. You can’t just put a wetland anywhere and expect it to improve water quality; you have to put it in a location where the landscape is right. Most importantly, you have to place them where water from agricultural areas will actually flow into them. You can't reduce nitrogen if you don't have nitrogen coming into the wetlands.”

Van Meter’s research approach centers on the creative examination of the widely used herbicide, metolachlor. According to the U.S. EPA, metolachlor is not toxic to humans at low levels and it quickly degrades into a compound called MESA, which can persist in the environment and move through the landscape like nitrogen.

Van Meter plans to examine the presence of MESA in water samples from wetlands to determine if they are receiving agricultural runoff from nearby fields. This information can be used to track the movement of agricultural pollutants in the environment and identify priority areas for wetland restoration efforts to achieve the greatest benefits of improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay region.

“The primary novelty of this research lies in the use of MESA to inform estimates of agricultural nitrogen fluxes to wetlands and thus to improve landscape-scale predictions of nitrogen removal by wetlands,” said Van Meter.

The CAREER award allows Van Meter to expand upon her previous and concurrent wetland research, which is supported by both NASA and USDA. The funding will also be used to create the Chesapeake Bay Summer Water Institute, a pilot program that aims to facilitate better connections between Penn State and other nearby universities and agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) operating in the Chesapeake Bay area.

The institute will also host a four-week formal summer program for a cohort of graduate students.

“The program aims to create a workshop environment that will train and educate a new generation of researchers,” Van Meter said. “Our focus will be on addressing questions related to the Chesapeake Bay and working together toward specific research questions each summer term, which I hope will allow students to add something to their research and publication portfolio.”

Additionally, the NSF award presents an opportunity for Van Meter and fellow researchers to continue work conducted in the Riparia Center. Late professor emeritus Robert Brooks founded the Riparia Center in 1993 and began Riparia’s Reference Wetland Collection, composed of 222 wetland sites across Pennsylvania with data collection spanning 30 years.

Van Meter who now serves as the center’s associate director said, “Rob Brooks was a real leader in the field of wetland research and studying wetland function. We plan to run the Summer Institute through the Riparia Center. We’re really excited in this project to leverage that earlier data and identify wetlands where we would want to do more on the ground analysis. I think the NSF funding allows us to continue the work that's been going on here in the wetland domain over the last few decades.”