The National Great Rivers Research and Education Center’s Jerry F. Costello Confluence Field Station, on the bank of the Mississippi River in East Alton, is home to the growing Great Rivers Ecological Observation Network. Photo by National Great Rivers Research and Education Center (NGRREC)

Amid controversy over climate change, pollution, invasive fish species, and California’s widely publicized shortage, water is emerging as a subject of increasingly intense interest among scientists, policymakers and the public.

To help quench the new thirst for knowledge on the subject, the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center (NGRREC) in East Alton last month formally announced its Great Rivers Ecological Observation Network (GREON) — the first phase of a planned real-time, worldwide water monitoring system.

Though nestled unassumingly in a remote spot on the banks of the Mississippi, NGRREC aspires to be nothing less than a leader in scholarly research, education and outreach related to the interconnectedness of big rivers, their floodplains and watersheds, and the people who use them, according to Gary Rolfe, the center’s executive director. Headquartered in the Jerry F. Costello Confluence Field Station, the center is a partnership of the nearby Lewis and Clark Community (L&C) College in Godfrey and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The initial phases of the project are being funded jointly by the Walton Family Foundation, L&C, the McKnight Foundation, and the State of Illinois.

Under the GREON program, the center ultimately plans to establish a network of real-time water quality monitoring platforms on great rivers around the world.

To do that, the center has partnered with the Ohio-based scientific instrument maker YSI Inc. to design and launch first-of-their-kind monitoring buoys that are capable of real-time, continuous collection of water quality and phytoplankton data.

The first of the PISCES (Pontoon for In-situ Characterization of Environmental Systems) buoys was launched in May 2013 on the Upper Mississippi River System. Two additional buoys were launched in the fall of 2014 near the Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau, Mo., and near Stoddard, Wis.

This spring, buoys were stationed in the Mississippi River at the Clark Bridge and in a backwater channel near Alton, in the main channel at Cape Girardeau, and in Lake Decatur on the upper Sangamon River in Illinois.

Over recent weeks, buoys were deployed in Carlyle Lake on the Kaskaskia River, in the main channel of the Mississippi and a backwater channel near La Crosse, Wis. A similar sampling device will soon be deployed in the lower Sangamon River.

Data collected by GREON will be transmitted to, and housed in, the network’s companion initiative, the Great Lakes to Gulf (GLTG) Virtual Observatory.

The GLTG Virtual Observatory was conceived to expedite “the data-to-knowledge-to-policy connections” with GREON and other environmental monitoring efforts throughout the watershed, said Rolfe.

“The GLTG effort will facilitate ready access to water resource information from the Mississippi River and its tributaries.”

The observatory’s web portal, (http://gltg.ncsa.illinois.edu) will offer historical and current information about water quality in the rivers, characteristics of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in the rivers and floodplains, and interactions between humans and various components of the watershed.

“The GLTG will ultimately help prioritize data gathering and reliable knowledge needed to optimize large-scale conservation programs; facilitate collaborations and data sharing; and enable automated data extraction interfaces with highly visual decision support tools.”

While the GLTC site is now online, it is still in the early stages of development and new features will be added, the developers of the site emphasize.

In addition to launching its latest monitoring buoys and establishing the new data network, the NGRREC this summer is sponsoring some 30 college internships. Following a May 26-29 orientation at the center, interns are now in the field, working on the site-specific projects throughout Illinois, Missouri and Wisconsin.

The interns, representing a total of 20 colleges and universities and 12 states, are conducting a variety of research, gaining invaluable experiences in data/specimen collection and using standard protocols, and learning how to analyze, synthesize and interpret data, which will be translated into reports, according to NGRREC Environmental Education Manager Natalie Marioni.

The interns will present their research findings via oral and poster presentations during the NGRREC Intern Symposium, Aug. 3-4, at the Costello Field Station.

For more information, visit www.ngrrec.org.

— East Alton monitoring water quality  —