Published: September 17, 2008 09:41 am         

Collaboration nets $500,000 grant

Drs. Joe Bidwell and Craig Davis believe in cross-college collaboration.

Bidwell, associate professor and director of the Water Quality Research Laboratory in the Oklahoma State University department of zoology, and Davis, associate professor in natural resource ecology and management, regularly work and socialize together.

In fact, they tell the story of the time they were together off campus and wrote a grant proposal on a napkin — and it was funded.

“The expertise on the campus needs to come more together and really work together,” Davis said. “Our new president has said he wants that. I think he wants that.”

Dr. Stephen McKeever, OSU’s vice president of research, wrote in an e-mail that he also supports collaboration.

“The problems faced by today’s society — environment, energy, climate, economy, terrorism and politics, to name a few — require solutions found only at the boundaries between traditional disciplines,” he wrote.

“OSU is encouraging and supporting the formation of multidisciplinary teams to address these issues.”

Bidwell and Davis recently received a pair of three-year U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grants on which they are co-principal investigators. They will spend the roughly $500,000 researching wetlands in the state.

One component is the state’s oxbow wetlands, which are “formed after a river has changed its channel and you have remnants of that river and it eventually takes on the characteristics of a wetland,” Davis said.

He said they will be studying them to determine how these systems should be regulated from a water-quality standpoint.

“Depending on their size you are going to have a number of lake-like characteristics,” Bidwell said.

“The regulatory mechanism for lakes is pretty well established. We don’t necessarily know — and probably this will not be the case — that you can use the lake approach in wetlands.”

The other grant is for characterizing wetlands in the Ouachita Mountain Region, using similar techniques to those used by researchers in Arkansas.

“We want to classify wetlands so they can be better assessed in terms of what their condition is,” Bidwell said. “The approach to be used there is to locate the wetlands in the Ouachita mountains and classify them according to this (hydrogeomorphic classification system). They will be designated into different types of groups. That will set the stage to be able to do different assessments.”

They hope to characterize wetlands across the state and see more wetland protection in Oklahoma.

Bidwell said more than two-thirds of the wetlands in Oklahoma are gone since the state’s initial European settlement.

Davis added that some states have seen 99 percent of their wetlands drained for agriculture, but he hopes that won’t happen here.

In fact, he said people should visit Stillwater’s wetland, Teal Ridge, at the corner of Walnut and 19th.

“My hope is people will come out here and appreciate it and realize that wetlands aren’t mosquito-infested swamps,” Davis added.

“That’s why wetlands get drained is that’s the first thing people think about. They don’t really appreciate what a wetland is. These are really unique systems.”

He said wetlands perform many functions, including floodwater retention, nutrient cycling, filtration of contaminants and sediments and groundwater recharge.

“There have been studies done that have demonstrated that a well-functioning wetland can do the same job as a multi-million dollar waste-water treatment facility,” Bidwell added.

Dr. Loren Smith, head of the zoology department, wrote in an e-mail that Bidwell and Davis’ grants show the school’s strength “in the field of wetland science.”

“Bidwell from zoology and Davis from natural resource ecology and management have outstanding records and moreover their collaborative efforts show how successful we can be when we cooperate on interdisciplinary studies,” he also wrote.

     

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