On biogeochemistry: Welcome to Michigan River News

By Jeff Brooks Gillies • June 15, 2011

When I set out to write our About page about a month ago, I saw it as a chance to dust off my English degree and build a real heady argument for why Michigan River News ought to exist based on quotes from “the literature.” I scraped some raw material from a few scientific journal articles and an old text book and wove together a treatise on our important but imperiled rivers.

The document was fit for a hardcover binding. Before contacting the publishers I ran it past MRN staffer Andy McGlashen for any edits or additions he could muster. He gave it back to me polluted with a great many crossings-out and capitalized swears.

So my intellectualizing didn’t make it into the about page, which is probably for the best. Slapping the word “biogeochemical” in the middle of your news operation’s mission statement is an efficient way to indicate that you’re not to be trusted.

But this isn’t an about page. This is a blog post. In posts like these, which you’ll find under “Upstream” section of the site, anything goes.

More often than not, this section will harbor quick doses of news, pictures and videos that deserve more than a link but not an entire news story. The rest of the time, it will feature treatises on our important but imperiled rivers fit for hard cover binding.

On that matter, I’ll turn now to Hydrobiologia, a respected scientific journal of aquatic biology, recently dedicated a special issue to the threats posed to rivers worldwide by changes in land use, climate, hydrologic cycles and biodiversity. This is from the foreword, co-authored by R. Jan Stevenson, professor of zoology at Michigan State University:

“Rivers provide benefits to human well being with food from fisheries and irrigation, by regulating biogeochemical balances and enriching our esthetic and cultural experience.”

Rivers help us feed ourselves and perform essential ecosystem services. And they look nice and make us feel good. Simple.

This next quote comes from Limnology, a college text book for the aquatic biology class that got me into my first pair of waders.

“Streams can never be considered by themselves because the role of adjacent land is always crucial.”

A river is only as healthy as the land through which it flows. We may be limiting our reporting to rivers, but that coverage will inherently reflect the quality of the wider environment.

The last quote is from a 2010 study published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research on an effort to rate the ecological condition of all of Michigan’s streams.

“Michigan has experienced rapid changes in land use cover over the past three decades, and these changes have had substantial impacts on the hydrology and ecological integrity of its tributaries to the Great Lakes.”

That generally means more pavement, which pushes warm, dirty water from storms into streams. Combine that with climate change, the state’s aging dams and fights over water withdrawals, and you’ve got yourself a need for a nice news site focused on the state’s flowing waters.