St. Joseph River Basin Commission
Basin Bites and Technical
Tidbits
Third Quarter—September 2001
The St. Joseph River Basin Commission meeting is scheduled for September
11, 2001 at the Elkhart County Public Services Building, 4230 Elkhart Road (U.S.
33), Goshen. The meeting will begin
at 10:00 a.m.
Copies
of the artistically rendered map of the River Basin will once again be available
at the meeting.
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Who Cleans the River?
A recent question arose about removing
trees and debris that get into our rivers.
Although the Army Corps of Engineers and Indiana Department of Natural
Resources both have jurisdiction over certain activities within the “Waters of
the State” and floodway, neither is responsible for or has funding to remove
debris on a regular basis.
So who should be removing the materials that end up in our water ways?
According to the Army Corps, it is the local government where the waterbody
flows. In some areas, the
government has set up a small maintenance fund, aside from the general legal
drain maintenance fund, that is used specifically to aid in financing the
clean-up process. In other areas,
clean up is completed strictly by volunteers, often asking government assistance
to transport large items to area landfills, or other approved sites.
In either case, a caution must be placed on these clean-up operations. No activities associated with removing materials from the
waterway or within the floodway can be completed without an evaluation and
permit from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.
Proceeding without a permit, can result in a large fine from the Indiana
Department of Natural Resources.
As
a general rule, if you need more than hand held tools to remove the debris--a
chainsaw for example--a permit is required.
To insure that the loss of valuable habitat is minimized, the permit
application is always reviewed by fish and wildlife biologists.
River
front property owners and those who use our rivers for recreation, must remember
that the natural vegetation along the bank and the woody material in the river
are key factors that support healthy fish and wildlife communities. They simply can’t live without it.
There is an exception to the permitting process.
Small log jam projects, can often be handled through a special permit
that allows quick removal of the jam, if it is causing an immediate threat to
property or safety. This permit
must still be obtained from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources Division
of Water.
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Friends of the St. Joe Submit Section #319
Grant Proposal
The
Friends of the St. Joe River Association, Inc., headquartered in Athens,
Michigan, submitted a Section #319 grant proposal to the Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality to complete a St. Joseph River Basin watershed management
plan. Kieser and Associates, an
environmental science and engineering firm in Kalamazoo that has completed a
similar project for the Kalamazoo River Basin aided the organization in the
preparation of the grant proposal.
In addition to bolstering relationships between Indiana and Michigan, the
project would complete several objectives, if funded:
Consider
the varying jurisdictional interests, needs and objectives;
Consider
overlapping programs for Water Quality Protection;
Consider
watershed and sub-watershed-wide water quality issues;
Institutionalize
broader watershed protection policies;
Leverage
new and existing programs to benefit the river;
Prepare
plans for implementing improvements and policies through additional Section #319
funding.
The grant was submitted on August 15.
If funded the Friends plan to work both in Michigan and Indiana to
develop the plan. Further
updates on this activity will appear in future editions of this newsletter.
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Comments Requested by U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers on
Nationwide Permits Program
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is seeking comments regarding the
Nationwide Permit (NWP) Program. Reviewed
and reauthorized every five years, NWPs “are general permits issued on a
nationwide basis to authorize minor activities with minimal evaluation time.
Some activities authorized by NWPs require pre-construction notification
to the District Engineer, before commencing with the work.
This notification requirement to the District Engineer is necessitated to
ensure that activities authorized by these NWPs have minimal individual and
cumulative adverse impacts on the aquatic environment.”
Public notice is not required for most activities related to Nationwide
Permits. Categories of Nationwide
Permits, along with various regional conditions or restrictions can be viewed
at:
http://www.lre.usace.army.mil/functions/rf/html/pncur.html
Several
issues related to the revisions concern filling or construction activities in
wetlands and streams. These
include:
Allowing the Corps to waive the 300-foot limit on stream destruction;
Loosening restrictions on filling wetlands in floodplains;
Bypassing the minimum 1:1 mitigation requirement related to
creating one acre of wetlands for every acre destroyed.
Written comments related to the Nationwide Permit Program are
being accepted until September 24, 2001.
The Army Corps will hold a public hearing in Washington, D.C. on
September 12.
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Help for our dying waterways
Nearly
half of all the nation’s surface waters have reduced water quality related to
high levels of nutrients, particularly phosphorus and nitrogen.
Nutrient overload often results in low dissolved oxygen, species and
abundance shifts of flora and fauna, fish kills, and increased sediment
accumulation. High nutrients
increase algal blooms and eventually speed the “eutrophication” or dying of
the water body.
To address this issue, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has begun
to develop “nutrient criteria” for lakes and reservoirs, rivers and streams,
estuarine and coastal areas, and wetlands.
The criteria, when complete, would help to identify problem areas, serve
as the basis of state and tribal water quality standards for nutrients, and
evaluate relative success in reducing cultural eutrophication.
The criteria will be developed by ecoregion.
Northern Indiana and southern Michigan—which includes the whole St.
Joseph River Basin—will be included in the Ecoregion VII area. The ecoregions are developed based on similarities in soils,
land use, land surface form and potential natural vegetation.
For Ecoregion VII, the reference conditions are
Total
phosphorus
14.75
Total
nitrogen
.66
Chlorophyll
a
2.63
Secchi
Depth
3.33
As a
comparison, 97 percent of 160 Indiana lakes exceed the total phosphorus
reference condition and 83 percent of these lakes exceed the Secchi depth
reference condition of 3.33 meters.
A
Regional Technical Assistance Group consisting of federal and state agency water
staff, will assess all data, develop models and establish the final reference
conditions and nutrient criteria.
The
overall process to develop the criteria is long and detailed.
However, once developed the process will serve to protect aquatic life,
recognize regional differences, human uses of the water resources and the
natural constraints.
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Natural Nitrification Reduces Need for
Commercial Fertilizers
(Reprinted
from Watershed Events, Summer 2001)
Growing plants with commercial nitrogen rather than effectively using
safe atmospheric nitrogen has become common practice in most areas of North
America. However, excessive
nitrogen use has led to some serious pollution problems including hypoxia (dead
zone) in the Gulf of Mexico.
Since 1955 Growers Chemical Corporation of Milan, Ohio has promoted a
fertility program that includes reducing the use of applied nitrogen. Many agricultural operations and some non-agricultural
operations (such as lawn care services) have successfully used the program,
which has two basic components—supplying adequate amounts of calcium to the
soil profile and using high-grade, balanced fertilizer solutions.
Why calcium? Some bacteria
in the soil are able to fix nitrogen from air.
In the course of a year the members of one genus of bacteria, Azotobacter,
can fix 15 to 40 pounds of atmospheric nitrogen per acre!
Therefore, it’s important to create a soil environment that promotes
these nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Increasing
the available calcium helps stimulate bacterial nitrogen fixation.
Calcium also helps prevent the increased solubility of iron and aluminum,
which negatively affect nitrogen fixation.
In addition, calcium makes the soil more porous, allowing for better air
infiltration and exchange, and adequate levels of oxygen are important in the
conversion of nitrogen to a form that can be used by plants.
Finally,
earthworms flourish best in soils that contain a continuous supply of calcium,
and improved earthworm activity is critical for the optimum success of bacteria.
(Earthworms shred organic matter, making it more available to the
bacteria.)
The
second part of the Growers soil program, is use of a small amount of a
high-grade, balanced plant food solution on the seed at planting.
While providing crop nutrition, the food also promotes the efficiency of
the bacteria, in the fixation of nitrogen.
Foliar feeding of crops with this same material means less applied
nitrogen is needed to supplement the native nitrogen.
By using this program, farmers have significantly lowered their use of applied nitrogen while maintaining sound economic productivity. Growers Chemical boasts that clients have experienced higher grain test weights, better product flavor and shelf life, and fewer veterinarian visits for their livestock.