Oral Presentation

Warming stripes plots are a simple yet powerful way to convey large amounts of data. These plots show a series of bars filled with colors that represent annual temperatures, which allows clear communication of temperature changes throughout time. To date, air temperature data has most often been portrayed using warming stripes plots. I have adapted this concept to visualize water temperature data in rivers and streams. I acquired U.S. Geological Survey water temperature data across the U.S., comprised of >2.2 million observation from 224 stations across the U.S. that have been continuously monitoring water temperature for ≥10 years. These observations were summarized into mean annual temperature and presented in a website that allows users to view sites interactively on a map, and then view warming stripe plots of their choosing. The results demonstrate that although freshwater ecosystems are complex and dynamic, water temperatures are rising rapidly. This is consistent for watersheds in arctic and tropical climates alike. This presentation will provide an overview of the methods employed, a tutorial of the interactive website, and an invitation for those with additional data to contribute so that spatial coverage is enhanced. Currently, stations available within Pennsylvania are limited to the Delaware River watershed; datasets within the Susquehanna River are of significant interest.

If you are a landowner interested in installing conservation practices on your property, it can be daunting to figure out the full scope of options and who to contact to start this process. This challenge has been known to inhibit many individual property owners who own farms, woodlands, or residential property from pursuing conservation practices on their land, because the number of opportunities are overwhelming and a starting point is hard to identify.

Chesapeake Conservancy and American Farmland Trust have partnered to create a science-communication tool to summarize opportunities in an easy-to-digest printout for restoration practices specific to a landowner’s property. Restoration Reports.com is an easy-to-use online tool where a landowner can enter their address and management priorities, and receive a customized, understandable report of potential conservation and restoration practice options. Using high-resolution data and the latest geospatial technology, the Conservancy can tailor each report to the property level, and suggest appropriate points of contact for a landowner to get started. This presentation will discuss the challenge of reaching property owners in conservation and present a case study of how this tool was developed using GIS technology and applied to American Farmland Trust’s Women for the Land Initiative to reach women landowners and land managers. Restoration Reports is now available for landowners in nine Pennsylvania counties.

Aquatic insects have complex life cycles which often involve interactions with aquatic and terrestrial environments. Many insects rely on the presence of instream habitats, like riffles, to successfully complete multiple life stages. Riffles are particularly important for recruitment of insects that exclusively oviposit (lay eggs) on microhabitat like rocks or organic material. Riffles are also home to diverse larval communities that often serve as a source of individuals to proximal downstream habitat. We sought to investigate the extent to which instream habitat limits recruitment and community diversity of aquatic insects due to lack of suitable oviposition habitat and isolation of instream habitat patches.

To accomplish this, we constructed nine gravel and cobble riffles in a small central Pennsylvania stream previously lacking coarse inorganic and emergent substrate. These riffles were constructed in sets with different inter-riffle distances (15, 10, or 5 m) to determine if distance to upstream riffle and oviposition habitat affected downstream benthic invertebrate density. Benthic and drift samples were collected directly below each riffle and set of riffles every two weeks from September-October 2019. Riffles were also sampled for aquatic insect eggs, which were reared to adulthood in the lab. Composited Surber samples were also taken from constructed riffles and non-riffle habitat at the end of the experiment to compare community diversity between habitat types.

Initial results suggest that addition of emergent substrate increased insect recruitment to our stream, as 88% of egg masses were found on emergent rocks in riffles compared to 12% of egg masses on fully submerged rocks. Egg masses from Hydropsyche sp. (Trichoptera) and Chironomidae (Diptera) were found on both types of substrate, while Baetis sp. (Ephemeroptera) egg masses were only found on emergent rocks, which suggests that recruitment of taxa with selective oviposition behaviors could be limited by availability of emergent rock substrate. Additionally, larval insect densities were higher in reaches with riffles spaced 5 m apart (276.3 +/- 29.6) than in the control reach upstream of the constructed riffles (mean 113.7 +/- 7.6; ANOVA with Tukey’s pairwise comparison, p < 0.05). This study increased our knowledge of insect oviposition behavior and showed that providing oviposition and riffle habitat for aquatic insect taxa could improve recolonization and ecological recovery following restoration of habitat-limited streams. We suggest strategic riffle addition, including emergent substrate, as an augmentation of conventional structural restoration practices in streams.

Microblogging platforms provide an opportunity to reach audiences with a speed and scale much greater than traditional communication methods. They also present a vast source of publicly available data to analyze and identify successful or ineffective past practices in communication. Following the 2017 presidential inauguration ceremony, the active restriction of science communication by the Trump administration led to the creation of many unofficial and alternative, or “alt”, Twitter accounts for government agencies to maintain communication. Alt accounts quickly attracted many followers (e.g., 15 accounts with >100,000) and received a large amount of media attention. We analyzed tweets from paired “alt” and official U.S. government agency accounts to compare communication strategies and determine what elements of a tweet make it more likely to accrue attention (likes or shares). We found adding links, images, hashtags, and mentions, as well as expressing angry and annoying sentiments all increased retweets and likes. Evidence-based terms such as “peer-review” had high retweet rates; but linking directly to peer-reviewed publications decreased attention compared to popular science websites. Word choice and attention did not differ between account types, indicating topic was more important than source. The number of tweets generated, and attention received by, alt accounts rapidly decreased after the creation of these accounts, demonstrating the importance of timeliness in science communication on social media. Together our results show potential pathways for scientists to increase efficacy in social media communications.

The Clean Water Act regulates discharges of pollutants into streams and rivers, which includes point source discharges. This research aims to determine a framework for prioritizing best management practices (BMPs) and locations in urbanizing areas to fulfill the MS4 requirements. A list of criteria for BMP selection and placement was generated and GIS data consistent with the criteria were created to generate a spatial model identifying ideal BMP locations. Suitable locations for BMP’s are limited in river-towns such as Williamsport, PA. Working with local managers can improve models to help identify unintuitive locations for BMP locations, but overall prioritization systems are useful for MS4 regulated regions.

Federal regulations for municipal separate storm sewers (MS4) in the United States have been in place since 1990 as part of the Nation Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), aiming to reduce sediment and pollutant loads originating from urban areas. However, small-municipality MS4 permittees frequently face several common challenges, barriers, and misunderstandings in their efforts to regulate stormwater. We summarize common challenges and misunderstandings concerning MS4 management and offer real-world examples of effective approaches for satisfying MS4 requirements. For example, many municipalities see no funding mechanism for implementing stormwater plans, and small municipalities are at a particular disadvantage in the absence of direct federal or state funding. Taxes are a potential mechanism yet often unpalatable to local municipalities. Grants or the creation of a stormwater utility can offset costs to local communities but also face barriers to implementation. Additionally, best management practices (BMPs) can improve stormwater quality but benefits to the local community from improved water quality are often poorly understood or mischaracterized. In spite of this, there are several MS4 management approaches that may be more approachable, including forming coalitions, forming stormwater utilities, and establishing monitoring programs. Small municipalities can benefit greatly from a realistic, facts-based clarification of MS4 policies and practices that lays out all of the options available to achieve NPDES requirements.

Demographic assessments of all four cryptobranchid salamander species have continued to indicate declines over the past several decades. One of the conservation challenges facing all cryptobranchid salamanders is the paucity of information about larvae and juveniles. Larvae and juveniles have only rarely been encountered during field surveys, even in streams where adults have commonly been found. In the case of the Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus), several lines of evidence imply that larval and juvenile age classes use different habitats than adults such as small tributary streams, which have been overlooked by conservation monitoring surveys in Japan. We examined small tributary streams as possible habitats for young A. japonicus by integrating eDNA analysis with traditional field surveys. During the summer of 2018, we surveyed three first-to-third order tributaries of the Ichi River in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, and collected water samples from each stream (Stream A: 465 m stretch, N=8; Stream B: 955 m stretch, N=21; Stream C: 2,331 m stretch, N=22) for eDNA analyses. Although no A. japonicus were observed during the eDNA water sampling, we repeatedly detected A. japonicus eDNA in all streams. Given this result, we conducted field surveys in the summer and fall of 2019, consisting of a daytime survey and a nighttime survey for each of the three streams. During the daytime surveys, we found no A. japonicus in Streams A and B, whereas in Stream C we found one larva, one juvenile, and one new nest with a large adult male actively guarding, from sampling sites that showed notably higher eDNA concentrations. During the nighttime surveys, we found five adults and one juvenile from Stream A, one adult from Stream B, and 13 adults from Stream C. These results suggest the importance of small tributary streams for A. japonicus, especially for smaller breeding adults and likely for larval and juvenile development. There are numerous previously unsurveyed small tributary streams throughout the range of A. japonicus. Our results suggest that the coupling of eDNA analysis with field surveys provides an efficient monitoring tool to examine those overlooked habitats, which would further emphasize the importance of including small tributaries in the conservation management of A. japonicus and potentially the other cryptobranchid salamanders.

Regionally in the northeastern hardwood forest ecosystems, the use of alien plants for ornamental horticulture, the escaping of those plants as invasive species, and the deliberate removal of native vegetation in the process greatly limits carrying capacity for migratory birds. Invasive plant species disrupt the natural succession of unused farmlands and open spaces. Before suburban sprawl, the spaces between cities were greater and provided a corridor between natural areas. The carrying capacity of highly developed areas can be improved by directly improving the abundance and biodiversity of native vegetation in the first trophic level. By eliminating invasive plant species, replacing alien ornamental species with native alternatives for specialist and generalist insect species, and reducing lawn area, native insect populations increase thereby improving carrying capacity and breeding success of migratory birds. This also has implications for mitigation efforts for other ecosystem processes affected by anthropogenic and environmental risks.

This presentation will summarize the findings and recommendations of a USDA NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant that explored the feasibility of municipalities achieving required stormwater pollutant reductions by implementing select best management practices on agricultural lands. project team worked directly with four municipalities in Lancaster County to gauge municipal interest in these types of partnerships, identify potential projects, and develop preliminary cost comparisons between agricultural stormwater projects and urban stormwater projects. Project partners included representatives of CBF, RETTEW Associates, Red Barn Consulting, Land O Lakes, and Quantified Ventures.

The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) Bureau of Geological Survey (BGS) has compiled a comprehensive workflow that will be used to generate hydrography data for the new elevation-derived Pennsylvania Hydrography Dataset (PAHD). This workflow relies primarily on geomorphon classification of (QL Level 2) lidar-derived elevation data as a means of identifying potential flowpath geometries which are subsequently winnowed to remove artifacts and other irrelevant features. The geomorphon areas that remain are further processed to create a vector flowpath network. Final steps in the workflow assign attributes, some from the NHD, others by running specific tools. The end goal is a scale-equivalent and dynamic hydrography dataset for the state of Pennsylvania, created using derivatives created from quality level (QL) 2 Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) elevation data. For the purposes of this project, “scale-equivalent” is defined as horizontal accuracy to one meter and vertical accuracy to half a meter at a 1:2,400 scale with reference to the most current elevation data. This presentation briefly examines the major components of the most current methodology for producing flowpath geometries.