Lake Doctor | A Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams Podcast
Welcome to Lake Doctor: A Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams Podcast, your go-to source for understanding and preserving the health of our local lakes. Join hosts Dr. Nate Bosch, an expert in limnology, and Suzie Light, a lifelong resident and passionate advocate for our aquatic environments, as they dive deep into the challenges facing Kosciusko County's lakes.
Dr. Nate Bosch grew up in Michigan and received his doctorate in 2007 from the University of Michigan in limnology. With 18 peer-reviewed publications spanning research from the Great Lakes to smaller inland lakes and streams, Nate has been awarded the prestigious Chandler Misner Award twice by the International Association of Great Lakes Research. At Grace College, Nate is a professor in the environmental science program, dean of the School of Science and Engineering, and leads the Lilly Center team, serving the local community with dedication and expertise.
Each episode tackles these critical issues head-on, featuring insightful interviews with our partners, engaging Q&A sessions, and fun segments for the science enthusiasts among us. You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at the impactful research and education efforts spearheaded by the Lilly Center and discover how we can all contribute to safeguarding our precious freshwater ecosystems.
Tune in bi-monthly starting June 2024, and join the conversation by leaving comments or emailing us at lakes@grace.eduwith your questions and ideas. Supported by the K21 Health Foundation, Rick and April Sasso, and DreamOn Studios, this podcast aims to inspire and inform the next generation of water-literate citizens and environmental stewards. Learn more about our work and how to support us at lakes.grace.edu.
Lake Doctor | A Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams Podcast
Why a Controlled Wildfire is Important for our Lakes with Nate Simons
In this episode of The Lake Doctor Podcast, we welcome Nate Simons, Executive Director of Blue Heron Ministries and a long-time leader in ecological restoration. During our discussion, we will explore what it means to be stewards of the land. Nate shares stories from decades of restoring native habitats like prairies and wetlands across Indiana and offers a hopeful vision for how thoughtful human intervention can reverse ongoing damage and strengthen ecosystems.
From reintroducing native wetland like fens to restoring ecosystems with fire, Nate helps us understand how care and collaboration can lead to lasting environmental impact. This episode will equip and encourage you to see your role in the bigger picture of creation care.
Visit lakes.grace.edu to learn more about the research mentioned in this episode and discover how you can support healthy lakes and streams in your community.
Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at https://lakes.grace.edu/.
Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to lakes@grace.edu or submit a comment below.
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Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at https://lakes.grace.edu/.
Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to lakes@grace.edu or submit a comment below.
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Thanks for joining us on our new set of the Lake Doctor podcast. I'm Susie Light and my co-host, dr Nate Bosch, is a professional lake nerd.
Speaker 2:That's right. I received my PhD from the University of Michigan in limnology. Susie and I are both excited to welcome to the set today Nate Simons. He is the executive director of Blue Heron Ministries and we're excited to talk about how human intervention can help in stewardship of nature.
Speaker 1:Nate's passion for his work just shines. We are really excited for today's Doctor podcast on our new set. We're pretty excited that you're here today. My pleasure, tell us a bit about you. Where are you from? Where'd you go to school? Doctor podcast on our new set we're pretty excited that you're here today. My pleasure, tell us a bit about you. Where are you from? Where'd you go to school? Where are you living? And then I want you to launch into what Blue Heron Ministries is about.
Speaker 3:Okay, so I was born in the Indianapolis area, but our family moved to northeast Indiana, steuben County, because that's where both my parents' families were from and the idea was to get us kids to be in more contact with our grandparents. So my freshman year in high school we moved up to Angola and so I graduated from there and then headed to Ball State University to pursue landscape architecture and we was married, actually before college, my wife and I. We were high school sweethearts and the only girlfriend I ever had actually. But we got married and went off to school together and had kids during school, and so school for me was not for what most people get, you know, as far as relationship building. For me it was let's get this done and provide for the family. So, anyway, but we stayed in the area, in the Muncie area, for five additional years. I started a landscaping company because I didn't know what else to do with my degree. But the one thing that I thought was very important that I got from my degree was an interest and a desire to work in the rural landscape instead of the urban landscape where most landscape architects work and make money, and that desire came from just my upbringing of, of living in the in a rural landscape, and uh, so I, when I discovered that there was a place for landscape architects in the in the rural landscape, I began to pursue that and uh, eventually, uh family moved um back to steben county and uh got a job, job in Fort Wayne at a landscape architecture office that worked in wetland delineations, land planning and park design, and then so that that was that's how I got professionally into that, into that area, into that area. But then, as far as getting into Blue Heron Ministries, that was basically a vision that I received from God to do. I was not satisfied with the kind of work that I was doing in Fort Wayne and I was gosh. I had all kinds of ideas. I wanted to start a business that my kids could even be a part of, and doors kept shutting and it just didn't work. I put this business to death, basically crucified it. But that vision came at the beginning of of that um, and the vision was of uh I was, I was in a landscape, a native landscape in, in, uh, gary, indiana, um, and uh it was.
Speaker 3:It was in november and the, the, you know the, the sky looks different in november. I don't know if you've seen that, it's kind of an orange hue. All around me was this short grass prairie. Little bluestem was the dominant grass and in the fall, little bluestem actually has a fall color. It's kind of a russet color, tan color, and then the seed heads are very hairy and they were glistening in the low sun, and so there's this orangish cast over the whole thing, accented by the fall color of the little blue stem, and the sun was shining through the hairs of the seeds and glistening. And then the wind picked up and started moving all of these grasses and I was bedazzled by diamonds.
Speaker 3:And I was overwhelmed, physically overwhelmed by it. And at that moment I understood that I was in all of creation which you know in this case we had the wind, the sun, the plants. You know, all of creation was worshiping its creator and I got to observe that, I got to be a witness to that phenomenon and at that point I said I wonder if anybody else can see this. And so from that point on, from that vision, I began to say I want to be able to restore natural landscapes, native landscapes, so others can see the glory of the landscape itself but also the glory of the creator of that landscape. I started and I knew that this vision was bigger than me. I couldn't do it myself. I needed help, I needed people to come along with me and I started looking for folks who I started sharing this story and the ideas I had. I wrote a one-page business plan, just you know, simple, a few bullet points, and shared that. And people thought it was crazy, or people gave me ideas, whatever.
Speaker 3:But anyway, I ended up meeting a pastor of a local church who had just gotten back from a sabbatical. He went to Scotland to do a sabbatical and I think that was his home. Yeah, it was. He has a kilt. I mean he's, and I think that was his home. You know, it's where his yeah, it was.
Speaker 2:He has a kilt and a.
Speaker 3:I mean, he's not Scottish Ancestral home, exactly exactly, but he wrote an op-ed in the local newspaper about his experience and in it he talked about being able to see the glory of God in the green landscapes up in Scotland. I don't hear pastors and preachers talking about this guy.
Speaker 3:I've got to meet him right, and I did, and we hit it off right away and we began checking out each other's theology. And about five months later, that was August of 2000. And December he invited me into the directorship of an environmental ministry and I said I didn't know you had one. He says, oh, we've always wanted one, we just didn't know what to do with it.
Speaker 2:and and he said it's, it's carte blanche.
Speaker 3:You can do whatever you want, you know, and um you, you can be um, an official, a subsidiary ministry of our uh denomination. I thought it was going to be congregation. It ends up being a denomination. It was a Presbyterian Church, usa at that point, and so a couple of months later it was approved by the board of sessions for that congregation and in the meantime I'd come up with a name for Blue Heron Ministries with the help of my kids, which was fun, and they were the one that came up with the Blue Heron. But it took another year and a half to figure out how we were going to make this work and the board that I had said, you know, you got to be self-supporting the bane of all nonprofits right, exactly.
Speaker 3:Exactly. You got to make some money somehow. Oh, okay, and so I said what I can do, what I could market, so to speak, is being able to paint the picture of what this landscape used to look like when it was presumably healthier, when it was less developed, when it was beautiful, when it was productive, when the relationships were right between the people and the land. And so you study that kind of.
Speaker 3:There are anecdotal histories of what the landscape looked like right at the turn of settlement period in the 1830s, and there are survey records, survey notes, that indicate what the landscape looked like. And then you have documents, the old botanical surveys, what was here, and so I was able to kind of piece together what the landscape could have looked like Now we don't know exactly, but what it could have looked like. And then you discover little remnants that are still around right, and so you take people to those remnants and show them, say you could have this, I could build this for you, and at that time it was just me and people bought into that. Yeah, how much would it cost me to have that on my property? And over the years then it has grown, the number of patrons and the kinds of patrons we have has blossomed and the staff that we have has has grown. How?
Speaker 3:many staff members we have, um right now. I usually say six full-time field stewards, but we now have five because just this weekend one of our, one of our staff, uh, his wife had a baby and he's going to take a month off, so so we have. We have five right now, but yeah, and they, they work, you know, um all year round.
Speaker 2:There's always something to do in the landscape and what sort of ecosystems do you guys work with blue heron ministries?
Speaker 3:so the what lakes country looked like um is a as a continuum, um, from the shoreline of the lakes um up into the, the uplands, um, that continuum is a is a grassland oak ecosystem and it was maintained by fire historically and we've lost gosh well over 99.9% of that landscape, so it's a globally endangered ecosystem, this prairie oak ecosystem that was once here.
Speaker 1:So oaks were the dominant trees, not the maple.
Speaker 3:Not here.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oaks.
Speaker 1:And when you say here, like how far From Lake Michigan down to.
Speaker 3:Logansport that's kind of a point there, and then it goes back up into northeast Indiana and of course, course, it's a lot of lower southern, lower michigan is also that same, that same ecosystem and was it built that way because of the wind?
Speaker 3:um, I'm thinking sand and dunes well, yeah, I mean as far as sand is. Yeah, sand is obviously wind, wind blown, but not all of the of of the prairie oak ecosystems are built on sand. They're on usually coarse textured soils. Yeah, sands and gravels, but not the fine sand that you see blowing off of Lake.
Speaker 1:Michigan for example, so part of glaciers.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so right. So the glaciers deposited the sands and gravels that came. You know, this glacial lobe came off the Saginaw Bay and deposited the sands and gravels down to about Logan's Port. But then the bigger picture is that the prairies from the Midwest, from from Illinois, for example, um are, are advancing this direction, uh, you know, to the East. Uh, where there's, you know, there's less, uh, rainfall out there.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And then you have the East coast coming off of, off of uh, the Atlantic ocean. It's mostly forested and you have a lot more rainfall, but here we have about 35 inches of rain, and so we're in the tension zone where the the prairies come from the west and the the the forests come from the east. We're right in that tension zone where the, the oaks, and the and the grasslands, um coexist together. So, yeah, but but the neat thing about this system is that it is has always been since the glaciers, um, since people moved back into the area, it was always, um taken care of with fire. So it's always been since the glaciers, since people moved back into the area, it was always taken care of with fire. So it's always been a fire dependent and dominated ecosystem.
Speaker 2:So what is and it has let me interrupt here a minute but it has this look of it when we, in our mindset in the Midwest, think of a park where you have trees spaced apart, with grass underneath the trees, or maybe somebody's sitting and having a picnic, or there's a on a blanket, or there's a picnic table or a swing set or something like that, that's what these, these, these Oak Savannah, this Oak Continuum looks like, would have looked like a picture that you'd see of the African Savannah where you have these trees Structurally yeah.
Speaker 2:Sort of, and then you've got grasses amongst them, and so that's how this would have looked too. So with those trees spread apart, you'd have enough sunlight coming in that you can have grasses growing down at the ground level and things spaced apart, so you have long sight distances across and just a really lovely-looking ecosystem it is.
Speaker 3:And some of the earlier pioneers, when they came to this area, would actually comment on how gorgeous it was and some really flowery languages used to describe this ecosystem.
Speaker 3:So James Fenimore Cooper wrote a book called Oak Openings is used to to describe this, this ecosystem um oh so james fenimore cooper, right, okay, he wrote a book called oak openings or bee hunter, and it was about the oak openings in around kalamazoo and in it he describes the first one to describe when an oak opening was uh, poetically and uh it's pretty cool. But but other other um descriptions like you're talking about would be like an orchard of oaks in a sea of grass.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that. That is poetic yeah.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of a landscape that people can resonate with and they can live in. Right, it's not scary, it's not like the black forest, but yeah, so it's a neat landscape that we once had.
Speaker 1:So you were talking about prescribed burns. Yes, what is a prescribed burn? Why is it important?
Speaker 3:Well, so these prairie oak ecosystems are dependent on fire for their perpetuation. The oak trees have a thick corky layer that resists heat, and then the grasses. It's crazy, a grass plant itself. Two-thirds of it is underground in the form of roots that decompose a little bit each year. But almost the living biomass is underground. The majority of it decompose a little bit each year. But you know, almost the living biomass is underground, the majority of it, two-thirds of it, just one-third, is above ground.
Speaker 3:And and that, that one-third is above ground, you know, starts out as a green plant in the in the late spring and through the summer it grows, and in the fall it turns, you know, brown, or you know russet or tan or whatever that fall, the fall color of the grass is, and that part dies and then falls to the soil surface, but the plant is still alive underneath. But that then becomes you change the word from biomass to fuel that becomes that, with the oak leaves, which is also high in lignin content, like the grasses, is very flammable the oak leaves, because that lignin content, decompose slower than maple leaves, for example. Maple leaves decompose in less than a year, but oak leaves last a couple of years, and so it's always, it's always fuel for fire, and and the first peoples, the peoples that came and that were, you know, taking care of this place before us, knew that. And you know, at first, you know, the fires may have started by, you know, in a natural means, in a lightning strike, for example.
Speaker 3:Or, you know, a lightning would strike up in a punky cottonwood tree, for example, during a thunderstorm. We don't have the same kind of weather that we have out west, where a lightning strike, dry strike, will form a fire right away. For the Midwest it's more of a it smolders up in the tree in some punky thing and then when the wind picks up and it dries out, you'll have embers that fall on the dead grass and then it takes off. Well, the Native Americans would mimic that and they would burn intentionally for various reasons. There's a whole host of reasons that they learned to use that as a cultural tool. And so because that ecosystem requires fire, perpetuation and prescribed fire, fire basically is trying to imitate or mimic that natural process and and and then. But then you also have to think. You call it a natural process, but you also realize that people are part of that process and you know it's okay to say that people are natural you know, and they naturally belong here, right?
Speaker 3:And naturally a part of the care of that system. So for us, doing prescribed fires is imitating the way that this land has been taken care of for millennia.
Speaker 2:Well, if you even go all the way back to Genesis 1 in the Bible, Adam and Eve were given a job in the garden to work we often think of work came after fall and know fall and sin and stuff like that. But actually that was prescribed right from the beginning was to care for this garden, care for creation, and so it's just a natural extension of that prescribed burn and human interaction in order to increase the fruitfulness of creation and be able to help keep things in better balance.
Speaker 1:Dr Nate, have you done some prescribed burns on Grace campus? Yes, we have?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's with Nate's help here. Back when I first started here at Grace and we were launching this new environmental science program, we said hey, what are those five major ecosystem types across Indiana? Well, we've got lakes and streams. That was my background with my PhD at University of Michigan. But then we've got wetlands as well, which I did some work on in grad school. But then we have prairies and forests in addition to that. And then from Nate I learned that it's not actually you can't separate all of them, it can be more of a continuum and some are kind of intermixes of each other.
Speaker 2:But we thought, hey, we need these five ecosystems on our campus so that we can learn about them. So obviously, just down the hill from campus we have Winona Lake. We've got several streams that flow into that lake. We've got three different types of wetlands on our campus here. We also have a couple of different forest communities. And what we didn't have was the prairie ecosystem.
Speaker 2:And there was a section of our campus out by our athletic complex which was being mowed but not used for any athletic fields.
Speaker 2:And so we talked to the folks there hey, can we stop mowing this certain section and let's create three experimental plots, prairie plots, so each of them are 50 meters by 50 meters. And Nate had the idea hey, let's let two of them just see what's in the natural seed bank and what starts to come up once we start burning and restoring that way. But then that third one let's actually try to start over there and let's go out and find some of these remnants, uh, these remnant prairies from around, uh, northern Indiana, and let's collect seeds and let's intentionally plant a high quality prairie as one of those three plots. And so we did that for that one, and then the management, the human interaction, the human component of helping that balance is then to allow fire, and so it's not a large enough swath that a fire is naturally going to carry through hundreds of acres and then come on to our campus. So we have to actually actively start the fire in these. And so two of the three-.
Speaker 2:And put them out, and putting them out is important as well.
Speaker 2:And so they not only helped us with just planning this out, but then also how do you do a prescribed burn and how do you do it safely so you can put it out when you're done? And so we started doing that on campus probably over 10 years ago. We've been doing those prescribed burns and one of the plots we burn every three year. The other two we burn every year and it's come to be a really fun tradition for the students here. You know the pyromaniac in some of us comes out a little bit and it's active, it's fun You're seeing. Know you start with this sort of brown square and you end, if you do it right, with a black square.
Speaker 2:And then one of my favorite times is you usually do that early in the spring, late March, early April and then right away by mid-April you start to see the green of the grass starting to re-sprout and it's just such a cool sort of reset of that ecosystem and it's just a really, really gratifying process.
Speaker 3:Sometimes I get to educate small kids and I developed a little book, a flip book, no words in it. It imitates this very thing. It has how many pages is it? Uh, four pages, five pages. And so starts first page is black, second page is green, the third page, maybe, it only has four the uh. The third page is, um, our autumn colors, and the. The fourth page is orange, and then the fifth page is page one. Again it, it's black, and you keep so. There's several chapters, but it's all the same thing. Every single chapter is the same, and they get the. They begin to get the rhythm of what happens each year as it goes.
Speaker 1:That's really cool. Yeah, Now you both used a phrase I'm not familiar with remnant prairie. Tell me what a remnant prairie is.
Speaker 2:So that would be an area of prairie that's been here all along, right, and it's persisted somehow some way. Some of them have been along the edges of railroad tracks because, as we've been talking about, prairies need fire. Historically, our railroads were places, you know, steam-powered locomotives, where sparks are coming off either from the metal on the track or from the cinders, from the coal or wood-fired, whatever it might be, and so you have constant burning along those, and so those prairie species then would persist along those railroads that were, you know, put in many years ago.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that were put in many years ago. Yeah, yeah, pioneer cemeteries also have remnants. Sometimes People were buried in beautiful places next to farms and areas that had never been plowed, because people started dying right away when they came into the area. And so they'd plant them in beautiful places, and the prairies were gardens for them to be, for people to be planted in.
Speaker 2:And oftentimes when we were out collecting those prairie seeds, we were there Oftentimes these little cemeteries kind of on a hill, and maybe it would be mowed kind of around the gravestones, but maybe there's a little perimeter area that wouldn't get mowed right and right along, maybe an agricultural field or something. In those little sections, those little corridors along the edge, those buffers would then have a lot of these prairie plants that we'd be collecting seeds from.
Speaker 3:So there are two words and they're related. Remnant is a system that's still intact, but maybe much, much smaller than its original extent. And then there's relic, but maybe much, much smaller than its original extent. And then there's relic. Relic would be a single prairie species that has survived, or a big oak tree would be a relic of what was once here. But sometimes you'll see along the roadside, you'll see a single prairie plant growing.
Speaker 1:Say, yep, there was a prairie there one time, but that's the only thing growing the lone survivor, right, the lone survivor, yeah. Do people have misconceptions about fire and why a grass fire is a bad thing?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I've got some stories. When we first started that on campus here, our local fire department was like you want to do what you want to purposefully set fire in a natural, a natural ecosystem, like our job is to put out, you're just going to make more work, we're going to burn down the whole forest or whatever. So it took some education and some talking through what's the proper permitting and uh, and then, like I alluded to before, nate helped us think through kind of how do you, how do you successfully start the fire? That might even be a good, a good process for you just to describe to us how do you successfully start the fire. That might even be a good process for you just to describe to us. How do you set up a prescribed burn.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, sure. So you're looking at the weather. The weather is the big factor for prescribed fires. It has to be dry, right? It can't burn in the rain and it can't burn in the snow. So it has to be dry and there has to be some kind of wind that drives the flames, right. Some people think it is dangerous to have any kind of wind at all and they get nervous. But for us, when we're setting up a fire, no wind is scarier, because you don't know when there might be a gust from some direction that's going to catch you off guard and it's going to go out of bounds, so to speak.
Speaker 3:So you're looking at a unit and Nate's example 50 meters by 50 meters, and so you have a unit, an area that you intend to burn, and then you're defining the perimeter of it, right. So in this case they have mowed lawn grass around the perimeter, but it may not be that. It may be the perimeter. The part that's not going to be flammable may be a parking lot, it may be a creek, it may be a lake or maybe a road. So you're going to have, you're going to set the perimeter such that you're going to be able to contain the fire, hopefully. And so that's the first thing to think about is what's the unit you're going to burn, what's the perimeter going to look like? How are you going to keep it in bounds?
Speaker 3:And then you're looking at the wind direction, relative humidity and the wind speed. Those are the three weather factors you're looking at. So you're looking for relative humidity that's less than 60%, you know. The lowest we go around here is usually about 20%, you know, which is still a lot more moist than out west where they get. You know single digit relative humidities. But so anywhere between the 20 and 60%, you know the fuel will, will carry fire. Then you're looking for the wind direction, you know.
Speaker 3:And so in today's culture, you know you're, the smoke that comes off of a fire is the thing that you're thinking about, because you don't want to offend people down, downwind with your smoke. So if you have a school or a hospital or a nursing facility, you know downwind you're not going to burn that day if the wind is going to take smoke in that direction. So you're cognizant of the direction, this, the direction the smoke's going to go, the direction the fire's going to go. So, um, so when you set up the fire, then the burn. You're actually starting down downwind, at the, at the perimeter. You know up against something that is not going to be flammable and you start lighting your fires and you let the. You let the, the fire back into the wind and it consumes the fuel, the grasses and the oak leaves very, very slowly and in a in a controlled manner.
Speaker 2:You know and then it's going against the wind very slowly, right.
Speaker 3:And then you start working around the edges, which are called the flanks, and now it's starting to burn a little bit differently. It's starting to pull in a little bit with the, with the wind and direction, but you're still creating black against your, your perimeter. So the whole idea is you're still creating black against your, your perimeter. So the whole idea is you're, you have a second defense, because anything that's black, the fire, the fuel, has been consumed and it's not going to burn. Okay, so you're creating as much safety zone around your, your unit, as you feel comfortable with. And then then, once you have the, the downwind side, the flanks, then you can start with the upwind side and just let the fire go and it's over in a matter of minutes and that's the exciting, that's the exciting part it just rushes across and so
Speaker 3:you can, if you can imagine, uh, you know, a prairie fire that was thousands of acres. There was no planning like that, you know, you didn't, you didn't set up a perimeter, you just lit it at one one river and and ran it to the next or the next lake or whatever, and it just raced across the landscape and it's hot and it was amazing, and you can set up what that does. Then it sets up its own little weather system, basically because the air is superheated and and, uh, the wind is intensified and and it can look very, very scary at at that point, and and then, at that point, it can look like the, the, the pictures and the videos that you get on on the nightly news, you know, out west. But you've, you've created that safe zone all the way around it and, and the chances of escape are are minimized.
Speaker 3:Now, to be honest, we've had escapes, um, but, uh, you always, you always have a, also have a contingency plan. What if? What if it gets, uh, it crosses the line that you've established, and so then you're, you know you're thinking about okay, we let it go to the creek there, okay, or do we let it go to the next parking lot? Whatever you know, that's, that's you always. You're always thinking ahead what if? What if something does go badly?
Speaker 1:but and these are prescribed. I mean, there is a plan and a permit.
Speaker 3:Yes, there is. So the prescription means the conditions under which you can complete your objectives safely and effectively. Okay, if you can't meet that prescription, then do it another day, right, right, and so, yeah, it's a plan, it's a plan.
Speaker 1:I'm so glad you explained that because I'm encouraging my husband. We might want to think about doing a burn on a little prairie that we've got and you know he has visions of me out there with a can of gas lightning something. And no, that's not the way it goes right.
Speaker 3:No, no no Boy okay, that's when the fire department gets called Right, and that happens, yes.
Speaker 1:So does a burn have an impact on other ecosystems?
Speaker 2:Yeah, ecosystems, yeah. So as we think of terrestrial ecosystems, they are having impacts on downslope aquatic ecosystems. Right, because water is always flowing downhill and it's carrying stuff with it. So if we have healthy terrestrial ecosystems that are holding the soil in place and holding back nutrients, then we don't have those extra nutrients or soils. When they get in water we call them sediments. We don't have those things coming into our aquatic ecosystems like rivers and lakes, and those nutrients when they come into aquatic ecosystems they cause extra weeds and algae to grow in our lakes, which we already have an overabundance of here in northern Indiana as well as throughout the Midwestern United States. So we want good, healthy terrestrial ecosystems to help us have good, healthy aquatic ecosystems.
Speaker 3:And, interestingly, some of those you know, the transition zones between the rivers, lakes and the uplands, could be wetlands, and many times those wetlands are actual prairies. If they are, you know, dominated by grasses and sedges and wildflowers, we consider those wet prairies and so they would have burned also, and up until the, you know, until the water puts them out.
Speaker 1:So what's the distinction between a wetland and a wet prairie? The plants that grow there.
Speaker 3:So a wetland is a larger umbrella, title or category and a wet prairie then would be a sunlit system rather than a swamp, would be a forested system, a shade system. A wet prairie would be a sun dominated wetland that has, you know, like said, grasses and sedges and wildflowers and no or little or few trees. They may have a shrub component, but there's enough fuel that can carry a fire.
Speaker 2:So wet prairie would another word for that be like a marsh, because a marsh marsh is a wet prairie, right?
Speaker 3:yeah, now the the. Obviously the marshes we have today don't look anything like they. They once looked like most people. When you talk about marsh, talk about a cattail marsh, right, and that's a. That is a, a system that is um invaded. Basically, it's not a natural system. We didn't have. We didn't have cattail marshes as such that we have today. We didn't have those historically. They were more grass-like.
Speaker 1:The marshes long ago were more grass-like.
Speaker 3:Yep, yep. So some of the major grasses were prairie cord grass, blue joint grass. You know, these grasses are just now only in remnant systems.
Speaker 2:And part of that is due to we don't have the same water fluctuations that we used to have.
Speaker 1:Is that right?
Speaker 2:Whereas cattails can't really deal with the fluctuation as much. Or do I have that backwards, backwards, okay yeah.
Speaker 3:So we have more fluctuation than we used to.
Speaker 3:Got it yeah backwards, okay, yeah, so we have more fluctuation than we used to got it. Yeah, more storm. Uh, we have more storm influenced wetlands than we we did historically. Now that you know the groundwater charged wetlands stay pretty near the base flow in, those stays pretty pretty, um, constant, and so that's, that's where you find your remnants, is where the usually is, where the groundwater is more of a factor than storm water right because I know that one management technique for a wetland that is sort of overcome with cattails is to mess with the hydrology a little bit, yeah.
Speaker 3:But then you've got to stabilize it if you want a stable plant community. Got it, got it. So you've got to kind of mess with it for a little while to get rid of the cattails and then stabilize it for those native species.
Speaker 1:A long-term solve right, Not just a one-year thing. So you alluded to a spiritual component to a prescribed burn. Tell us a bit more about that.
Speaker 3:Well, it's all going to burn right.
Speaker 2:Well, we don't have to get that extreme. No, it's yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, what I'm saying is you know, there's a for folks who have, who don't know the story that the scriptures tell, don't have an understanding of where the story is going to end, have this understanding that it's all going to burn and so we don't need to be worried about it at all, we don't need to take care of it. We are going to live up in the clouds somewhere and we're going to meet God somewhere, and this earth, this world in which we live, does not really matter.
Speaker 3:It's all going to burn and just don't worry about it. Or it's like this why rearrange the lawn chairs on the Titanic Right? And we come from a different stewardship. It comes from a different idea. It comes from knowing where the story started and where it's going to end. Idea it comes from knowing where the story started and where it's going to end. But and where it's going to end is God is going to come down and live with us on a restored new earth and it's going to look very similar to the Garden of Eden. They're going to be the same components, but it's going to be a garden city rather than just a garden. The idea was for the humans to take that garden that they first were planted in and then expand that into the rest of creation. They failed, you know, before that actually happened. But that's still. God's plan all along is to fill the whole earth with his glory and with people and with the rest of creation, all in a wonderful right relationship called new heavens and new earth.
Speaker 3:But anyway, the fire in the Old Testament is used as a concept of the day of the Lord or a judgment thing.
Speaker 3:But if you read all of those prophets in fact I just read one this morning, nehemiah, or no, zephaniah, sorry, zephaniah talks about fire. Several prophets talk about fire, but Zephaniah talks about fire. Um, several prophets talk about fire, but zephaniah talks about it and it's a purifying fire, it's a, it's um, and. And so you, what you end up seeing, like nate was talking about, is that once the fire moves across the landscape, it's taking all the way, all of the dead material right and creating and starting all over again for fresh, new green growth to happen. And so that's what a purifying fire does, and it's also like several of the prophets. Some of the prophets talk about burning off the dross in a smelting concept. Right, if you heat iron or any kind of ore hot enough, hot enough, the slag flows to the surface and the pure and good metal matter is still there if you pull the dross off. So it's a refining concept for a little bit, but the end result is beauty, growth, diversity, goodness and all kinds of neat things like that.
Speaker 2:And in the prairie ecosystem. The reason that we need that fire is for that tension that Nate was talking about before, where you have trees wanting to encroach on this sun-drenched landscape of the prairie and if those trees, if those oaks come in or other types of trees, start to come in and shade out that prairie grass, that prairie grass is going to go away. But the fire helps keep those trees back and keeps it open and helps continue to have those grassland sort of ecosystems. So the fire is sort of refining in that instance what plant community is there and it leads to greater diversity, like you've talked before with my students here at Grace about the number of species that can be in a prairie, and it rivals the tropical rainforests as far as how many species, and so it's thriving and it's diverse and it's just really cool. So sometimes fire we think of as a bad thing.
Speaker 3:It's going to hurt some trees, but look at what it's creating opportunity for, which is all of those grasses and wildflowers to really thrive those grasses and wildflowers to really thrive, which is habitat for a whole smattering of a whole suite of of of animals and and insects and that that would have been here and and still are, but are going to enjoy a new place to live, basically.
Speaker 1:So we talked about dunes and prairies and wetlands and woods, not forest. No black forest here. Yeah, what about fens?
Speaker 3:tell me a bit about fens they are another category or a sub category under wetlands, right, so it's been.
Speaker 3:It's also a wet prairie, um, there are, uh, and I alluded to this a little bit, there are the stormwater ecosystem, wetlands and ecosystems in their groundwater um charged uh wetland ecosystems, and a fen is a groundwater charged ecosystem.
Speaker 3:And so what happens on the, on the bigger picture, is that these sands and gravels that have been deposited by the glaciers you know now we got to go back, you know 12, 14,000 years or so, and think about you know what actually happened, or imagine what happened these glacial sluice ways that began to incise the, the, uh, the landscape and heading, heading to either you know lake michigan or or you know gulf of mexico, wherever.
Speaker 3:But anyway, these, these, these, um melt water, um channels formed, but then, uh, you had up above, you had the, the hills and the plains that were, that were uh sands and gravels and, over time, uh, the, the rain water then would um hit these sands and gravels right and, instead of running off, it actually percolates through the sand and gravel, the core, the, the pores of the, the sand and gravel, and um, so if you have, you have clay soils, for example, the water hits that and then runs off the surface and then puddles in a depression. All right, so a fen, you've got this. You've got the water rainwater coming through the sands and gravels and it's picking up minerals deposits dissolved from the sands and gravels, so magnesium.
Speaker 2:Calcium.
Speaker 3:Calcium and magnesium are the two minerals that are picking it up. And, uh, that that water hits a confining layer and, you know, deposited by the glaciers again. You know, because it's layers, it's a layer cake underneath, underneath the ground here, but it'll hit a confining layer, a dense layer, a clay layer, and that will usually be on a, on a slope, because it's heading towards one of these glacial channels, and that water hits the mineral rich water, hits that, that layer and it starts moving down slope, underground, okay, and it comes out at the base of the slope, above the, the creek or the lake right. And when it comes out it the base of the slope above the creek or the lake right, and when it comes out it deposits the water, deposits the minerals into a white, chalky-like material called marl. And then this marl is high in pH, you know, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Speaker 3:And it's a very harsh environment for plants to grow. But there are some plants that can grow in that, some wetland plants that can grow in that, and they, so they colonize this fresh um, outlay of of minerals and um and the water is continuing to flow right and it forms its little channels too, or little spring runs right. So a fen usually has a spring in it and a little little rivulet um, but the plants that are starting to grow in there, um are, are also annually decomposing, both the tops and part of the root system as well. And so when that um biomass decomposes, it's decomposing under anaerobic conditions or saturated soil conditions right underwater, and then that partially decomposed organic matter becomes a material called muck that's a technical soil term.
Speaker 3:Muck, it's just partially decomposed organic matter. Muck, it's just partially decomposed organic matter and um, and then that becomes a black soil that more uh species can can grow in um, but that groundwater is continually flowing through the system as it heads towards the, the creek or the river or the or the lake down below. So it's a. So finn, you know, in a big picture is a is a wetland on a slope that's groundwater charged and it usually has both marl and muck or peat, partially decomposed organic matter, and it's almost always a wet prairie in that it's dominated by grasses and wildflowers. It's dominated by grasses and wildflowers and a lot of our endangered plants and animals thrive in these fens. And these fens are our remnant ecosystems, because they're usually too wet to farm and it's tough to build on because the soil is really unstable, and so there are a few of them that are still around, and they become nature preserves, actually.
Speaker 1:So, Dr Nate, do you know where some fens are that people could go see if they wanted to?
Speaker 2:oh, um, I mean there's some on private property that I've taken my students to before as part of my aquatic ecology class. I don't do you know of any in kawaschewskill county. Yeah, what would be some some publicly available ones or the ones I know over in lagrange county.
Speaker 3:okay, and LaGrange County is where we work most. But LaGrange County the Pigeon River Fish and Wildlife Area has four or five dedicated state nature preserves that are fens associated with the, with the river the neatest place. But those are usually off limits to people. Either they they don't know about them or you know there are no trails through them, right? But the neatest place in LaGrange County is a place called Pine Knob Park. It's on State Road 120, maybe a mile east of Howe, and it's a county park and we helped Blue Heron Ministries helped restore a beat-up fen on that property and then the Parks Department built by themselves about a two-mile boardwalk through the fen fen so you can have an up close and personal experience in a, in a real fen, and uh, it's, it's really, really well done and it's beautiful and um, yeah, it's, it's, that's the, probably, that's that's. If I were to direct people to a place that they can actually get their, I was gonna say feet wet, but you don't get off the boardwalk.
Speaker 3:But I mean you can experience that what a fend is like. You can see the lake that this kind of flows to, you can see spring runs and you can see all the plants and sometimes the animals which there's Massasauga, rattlesnakes or federally endangered species are in these fends.
Speaker 2:I'm not a big fan of snakes, but that would be a cool one that I'd love to see someday.
Speaker 1:So I went on a walk with your staff from Lakes and Streams in the Boys Club trails and there's a fen back there that people can see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it might be kind of hard for people to find, but oftentimes, as what Nate was describing is looking for that sort of wetland area at the base of a hill and oftentimes sedges are a common plant type that you'd see. And how do you want to describe people, how to know the difference between a sedge and a grass?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so one of the rhymes is sedges have edges, so sedges in cross-section. If you were to cut a stem of a sedge, it's three-sided. So a grass is usually round or oval-shaped and cross-section, but a sedge has three sides, and so it's a huge family of plants, but most of them not all of them, but most of them are adapted to life in saturated soil conditions.
Speaker 1:So, like I want to make a pitch for this, If people want to see something interesting, they should go on the nature walks with your staff from Lilly's Center for Lakes and Streams. Because you do all kinds of fun things like leaf identification for trees.
Speaker 2:People can always go to our website, lakesgraceedu, and check out whatever events we might have coming up.
Speaker 1:We've got some cool events coming up.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So stewardship and economic development seem to go hand in hand. And, nate, I know that we did a study from the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams about the lake economy, the lake economy.
Speaker 2:How does having a healthy ecosystem impact economic development? Maybe I can start with that and then we'll shift it over to Nate to see what he might add. So we found that over $300 million comes into just our county each year because of the lakes that we have here in this area and if adjusted for inflation, it's been a few years ago.
Speaker 2:It's well over $400 million today. And so when we think about the lakes, the lakes are worthy to be protected and cared for. Okay, how do we do that? And we think about what is protecting our lakes. Wetlands are one of those systems that helps protect our lakes. So the healthier wetlands we have, the healthier lakes we're going to have, which means the healthier economy we're going to have. So how do those wetlands do that?
Speaker 2:Well, one wetlands can help hold back a lot of water, hold back a lot of water. So we know that oftentimes big flooding events can happen in our communities call it property damage and those floods can be reduced by having healthy, functioning wetlands. Those wetlands can absorb that water, hold on to it and then let it either recharge groundwater, the aquifers down below, or it can let that water start to leak out more slowly over time than after a big rain event or a big snowmelt event. Those wetlands also can help our economy by holding back nutrients. So wetlands are great filters. They pull in water and all of those plants in the wetlands are hungry for nutrients and can pull nutrients out, so that then the nutrients don't get passed on into a stream and then maybe a lake where those nutrients can cause weeds or algae to grow, which can reduce property values and reduce some of the recreational value on our lakes. So wetlands are really an important part of our local economy.
Speaker 1:And they can be groundwater, wetlands or storm-driven wetlands.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the interesting thing about that point is that the focus is on the wetlands as doing the work um, but if, if you look up slope from there, if you allow that storm water to go into the wetlands, and the wetlands is performing its its uh work, its function right, but it gets degraded by the storm water, so you start up slope from that. And if you have healthy uplands, that the you know the water is um the flow is reduced before it even gets into the wetlands. Then the wetlands themselves can function better as the filter. They don't get clogged right as much and they also have they're a better habitat um many times. You know the.
Speaker 3:The wetlands that are receiving storm water um are filled with these nutrients, that to which you refer in the sediment, and you end up with a plant community that is a monoculture. It's just nothing but cattails or reed, canary grass or phragmites, common reed. So it starts even higher up than wetlands. So it starts even higher up than wetlands, and the idea is that we got to save these wetlands because they actually have services that help us out.
Speaker 2:But in reality, we got to take care of it even higher up than that, and because of that history, some of those wetlands that we have maybe aren't functioning like they once did once did, and so there's even importance of being able to manage and restore, revitalize some of these wetlands to perform those functions. But if we didn't do anything with the upland, we're just going to be right back to the same problems that we have now with the wetlands, so both need to be worked on simultaneously.
Speaker 1:So restoring fens, restoring, prairies. Restoring oak woodlands fens, restoring prairies, restoring oak woodlands, blue heron ministries.
Speaker 3:You have a website when people want to learn more about what you're doing blueheronministriesorg.
Speaker 1:Okay, and both lily center for lakes and streams and blue heron ministries accept donations because you are charitable organizations doing good things, so is there a way for donating on your page? I?
Speaker 3:think so. I don't get on that site very often, to be honest, but I think there's a QR code that you can help donate to.
Speaker 1:Through PayPal.
Speaker 3:Yes, it's through PayPal.
Speaker 1:And we do know that donors can contribute to the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams on your website Yep Good. Thank you so much. You know I'm surrounded by Nates today.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Thank you, nate, for joining us and explaining your passion for the work that you're doing and the good stewardship. It is such a pleasure to meet you and hear your story. Thanks for being here today, thank you yeah, thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lake Doctor podcast. You can share your thoughts or submit a question by leaving a comment or sending an email to lakes at grace dot edu.
Speaker 2:Listening to this podcast is just the first step to making your lake cleaner and healthier. Visit lakesgraceedu for more information about our applied research and discover some tangible ways that you can make a difference on your lake.
Speaker 1:We'll see you next time. The Doctor is In.