With New Years and the tradition of making resolutions fast approaching, here is something that you can “test drive” or practice on for a few days prior to making the “resolution commitment”. It deals with time, and our frustration of never having enough of it.

How often do we say or hear, ”If I only had more time, I could …” and ”I have so much Email I can’t get anything done.” It is curious that Email, which originally was intended to improve office communication and productivity, has started to have the opposite effect. Compare the frequency of checking for Email to how often you go to the mailbox or the post office to pick up the daily mail. Hm-mm.

Several experts suggest to setting specific times for reading Email, only two or three times a day, and to not make it the very first thing in the day’s activities as well. When you stop to think about it, email provides a great deal of task distraction or interruptions from; I’ll just look that up and respond, to beginning whole new projects or tasks.

If Email is continually announcing new “incoming” it is something like working in a virtual arterillary attack. So try it for a day or two, setting say before lunch and late afternoon to check and process the in-box and see how much extra time you seem to have. You might start a “success” calendar by putting an “X” on each day of a calendar that you have maintained your committment to yourself and see how long a string you can maintain. Afterall Email is supposed to be a tool to help you with your work, not to be another job to do.

Best of the Holidays and I hope this “gift” works as well for you as it has for me.

Demonstrating the success of watershed management efforts is critical for securing future funding and public support. Yet most watershed groups find that the monitoring methods they are using cannot effectively show the impact of their project, and that demonstrating water quality improvement is prohibitively expensive or beyond their capacity.

Please join us at this one day conference, Wednesday December 3rd in Indianapolis, designed to share experiences where monitoring data have been used successfully to show change, apply what is learned to your own watershed, and to discuss the barriers that still exist.  IDEM Commissioner Tom Easterly will deliver a kick-off address, followed by keynote speakers Tom Davenport (USEPA), Charles Crawford (USGS) and Robert Gillespie (IUPU-FW).  The day will also include small group discussions focusing on issues specific to lakes, reservoirs and wetlands, large streams and rivers, and small streams.

Anyone interested in water monitoring in Indiana is invited to attend.  People actively engaged in monitoring are particularly encouraged to attend and will be given free conference registration if they complete a survey, prior to registering for the conference.  Registration information and a link to the survey are available at http://engineering.purdue.edu/~inwater/conference/.   For additional information, please contact Laura Esman at lesman@purdue.edu or 765-496-6331.

Coincidently while working on some watershed signs for Eagle Creek Watershed, this post from “Water Words That Work” showed up today. The point is made in the post that again we fall into the “watershed ? do I care? ” questions. (See post Watersheds … and video by Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore on this score) To the general public, Entering XYZ Watershed is similar to Entering ABC Soil and Water Conservation District. If you know what they are, cool; if you don’t, well it is just another sign.

Fortunately in Eagle Creek’s case, the reservoir it feeds is a drinking water source for Indianapolis. We use this fact promently on the signs to help connect the nebulous word “watershed” to drinking water. CLICK HERE FOR IMAGE OF SIGN 

Eric at Water Words That Work, makes a good point that if we are going to the time, effort and expense to put up a sign it is good to take a couple of moments and think about what the message is you want it to convey. There is also a “how to” sign guide available for download from the Water Institute of the OAEC.

Recently the University of Minnesota conducted a Best Practices for Field Days workshop at Camp Camby Conference and Retreat Center attended by some 20 folks from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. The workshop concentrated on how to build a field trip/day so that the students gain an understanding of what you want and that it is a memorable experience. Relevance, continuity and experiential learning are key building blocks.

While perhaps obvious, the development of a short, catchy, simple sentence that states your theme or “mission statement” for the field day is of utmost importance. Next, and equally important, the theme needs to be integrated into the marketing and used by the organizers, presenters, teachers and volunteers to make the event successful.

Eagle Creek Watershed Alliance held its 3rd annual field day “I can make a difference in Eagle Creek watershed” at Eagle Creek Park this past Friday. Around 150 fifth grade students from Zionsville attended this field day consisting of 5 stations ranging from water testing, wildlife, invasive species, watersheds and water treatment. Each station demonstrated and discussed specific items related to the station where the kids could “make a difference” in the watershed.

By reinforcing the theme, “I can make a difference“, from station to station activities, the end of the day wrap up with the entire group of fifth graders – they eagerly volunteered many activities they each could do to improve water quality in the watershed.

Angie Tilton of Project WET coordinated the field day with help from IDNR, IDEM, the Eagle Creek Watershed Alliance, INDY Parks and Veolia Water NA to mention a few of the many volunteers. Angie was also instrumental in getting the “Best Practices for Field Days” workshop to Indiana and she is an excellent statewide resource. Additional program and evaluation resources can be found at the University of Minnesota and also the University of Wisconsin.

If you’re interested in water quality and watersheds, consider applying for the 2009 Watershed Leadership Academy. The Academy, organized by Purdue University with support from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and other Indiana conservation agencies and organizations, gives participants the chance to:

• Engage in basic and advanced level watershed topics covering leadership principles, watershed science, organization and communication, technology and GIS, stakeholder involvement techniques and policy skills
• Meet, learn from, and build a network of peers
• Interact with topic experts
• Gain strategies, skills, and resources for successful watershed management
• Earn a Professional Certificate in Watershed Management

Saturday, September 13th, 30 groups from five counties coordinated together to clean up junk along a 75 mile stretch of the White River. Aiding in the coordination were the Friends of White River and the Upper White River Watershed Alliance.

Along with all the organizing efforts, and the actual cleanup itself, they acheived a lot more by increasing public awareness with four articles in the Indianapolis Star, including one on the front page. As more newspapers increase their web presence, don’t forget “community” sections whether hard copy or internet to heighten awareness of your group and its efforts.

Articles appeared September 6, September 9, September 12 and a wrapup on September 14.

Members of the Technical Committee of the Eagle Creek Watershed Alliance (ECWA) adjourned their meeting September 12th to tour and view the stormwater practices at INTECH Park. As well as being the largest office park in Indiana, it is a leader in combing advanced infrastructure design with low impact development and stormwater practices, something they call “Parkology – the marriage between technology and nature”.

Jill details some of the practices that will be seen

Joining the committee, were local planning officials from Zionsville as well as a Boone County Commissioner, Soil and Water Conservation Districts, MS4 Administrators and others interested in the development challenges the southeastern corner of Boone County faces. Jill Hoffman of Empower Results, and ECWA Coordinator, explained the directing of runoff from the parking lots through bio-swales as primary treatment before entering detention ponds and finally a constructed wetland when exiting the park. She emphasized the importance of using a “treatment train” approach and its ability to improve stormwater above minimal required standards. 

A major factor of INTECH contributing to “… beautiful waterscapes and recreation areas (that) are unparalleled.” is STORMWATER! Jill’s mantra of “celebrate stormwater” was clearly demonstrated during the tour.

But most important was the audience of local officials responsible for the planning and passing of ordinances that control development. All too often developers, such as those at INTECH Park, are faced with a mountain of regulations and requirements, often conflicting, all time consuming, that inhibit using new practices or thinking outside the box. Many times due to the pressures of time and economics, a developer will yield to the bureaucracy and just build it to code; another strip mall, another vinyl village, or whatever to meet the code requirements at the minimum. Meeting the minimum doesn’t improve water quality.

Eagle Creek Watershed Alliance has been a leader in targeting local officials to educate them to the need for more flexibility in ordinances and codes so that new and innovative practices aren’t met by a wall of red tape and “we have always done it this way” mentality. It is an important viewpoint that your watershed may wish to consider, if you haven’t done so already.

Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air we breathe. It is an essential plant nutrient, an important element in our food supply and responsible for lush green lawns in springtime. So what’s not to like? Well as we learned as kids with candy, too much of a good thing at the wrong time/place can be bad for you.

In the news recently we have read about hypoxia, or the lack of dissolved oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico and other marine dead zones around the US and worldwide. The dead zone in the Gulf is over 22,000 square miles (about the size of New Jersey) affecting prime shrimp fishing grounds. The nutrient rich runoff from the Midwest is a major contributor to this oxygen starved marine environment.

Two local programs in Indiana are taking steps to research and introduce farming practices that will reduce the amount of nitrogen in agricultural runoff. Recently a work shop was held by the Agricultural Drainage Management Coalition, the Conservation Technology Information Center and Purdue University on Drainage Water Management. Simplistically, this technique is the installation of a control structure at the outlet of a drain tile system so that the amount of subsurface water in a field can be controlled.

Control Structure

The outlet is raised after harvest to retain water over the winter and reduce the volume of water drained from the field an the subsequent nitrate delivery. A few weeks before planting, and harvest, the outlet is lowered to allow the field to drain fully. After planting the outlet is raised to store water for the crops with the potential of increasing yields and again to limit nitrate runoff.

Studies have shown that in Indiana most nitrate runoff occurs after harvest in the fall and winter when much of the soil drainage takes place. With proper management there is a potential to improve crop yields somewhat and more research is needed to better define it quantitatively. There is some indication that there is a real yield benefit from drainage management in years when yields are low.

Drainage management is eligible under the new Farm Bill for cost sharing through EQUIP and the CSP programs (final rules are being developed now). With no new land being put into production since 1985 and the loss of agricultural acreage to development it is important to look at new practices to increase bushels per acre.

The second method that shows good promise on reducing nitrate runoff is planting cover crops in the winter. The Eagle Creek Watershed Alliance has worked with a farmer in Hendricks County using annual rye grass as a winter cover crop. Rather than reducing nitrate runoff by “storing” it in subsurface water, the rye grass will use the nutrient and accumulate, in some studies, an average of 40 lb of nitrogen per acre. Again more research is needed as data was inconclusive due to a lack of rain the first year – good for runoff to the Gulf, bad from a farming and academic point of view.

For more information on drainage management refer to any of the following: Agricultural Drainage Management Coalition, Questions and Answers About Drainage Water Management, Purdue Agricultural Drainage website and the NRCS Standard Practice 554.

We all know what a “watershed” is, right? Of course we do. Google “watershed” and in less than a tenth of a second there are over 3 million results.

So why isn’t everyone as excited as we are about protecting and improving water quality in our watersheds?

I think the answer is that “we” talk funny. BMP, CREP, buffers, riparian, HUC codes … watershed. Check out this video, are these some of the folks you would like to be involved in your stakeholder, I mean neighborhood group?

Click for Video

Thanks to Eric at Water Words that Work – check over in the blogroll it is certainly worth a click.

Sounds almost ridiculous … and it probably is.

But think about it a bit. Most watershed grants are 3 years or so, you get a group together to form a steering committee, which meets monthly for a couple of hours — well you can see where I am going (3 x 12 x 2 = 72). That is not a lot of time to oversee the management of grant resources that are in the tens of or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Add the fact that most of the “steering committee” is composed of interested folk, volunteering their time – not necessarily CEO’s, MBA’s or management professionals and we have set quite a task before us.

Somewhere in the mix we need a few good individuals that are task oriented and can run meetings effectively. They will also need a good dose of conflict management and consensus building. Otherwise, time lines will slip, things left undone only to be brought up at the next meeting (again) and eventually the groups enthusiasm will fall off. This is the “where have all the stakeholders gone” syndrome.

In addition to a few good leaders, perhaps one of the most important people on the steering committee, and all the other committees is … the secretary/recorder/scribe whatever, that keeps the record of the meeting(s) including both goals met and tasks to be completed. Minutes can be a great management tool if: 1) they are accurate, 2) define the “who, what, when, where” for upcoming tasks and 3) are distributed soon after the meeting is over.

Too often I see meeting minutes attached with the email reminder for the next meeting or even distributed at the next meeting itself, then “approved” as part of the normal order of business. Now the stuff that didn’t get done is a month or two older and still undone.

Try to assign the “who” and the “what” along with the “when” in the minutes and get them distributed ASAP . This will remind folks of stuff that needs to be done, and also offers the committee chair the opportunity to give a follow-up nudge between meetings. I think you will be surprised how much more productive your watershed group will be