A river runs through it

Bruce Bisping, Star Tribune

The University of Minnesota’s new outdoor environmental research lab along the banks of the Mississippi River is believed to be the only one of its kind in the world.

The public will get a rare chance to see a lab that uses the Mississippi to study, and maybe save, the state's troubled waters.

By TOM MEERSMAN, Star Tribune

Last update: September 17, 2008 - 11:23 PM

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RIBBON-CUTTING AND TOUR

The new Outdoor Stream Lab and St. Anthony Falls Lab will be open for rare public tours on Friday, Sept. 19, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information visit: www.safl.umn.edu

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Its nickname is the "Mini-sippi."

The meandering stream lab in the middle of the Mississippi River is outfitted with high-tech gadgetry to study how rivers work and how they can be healed of erosion, fertilizer or flood damage.

The stream began flowing on June 20 when University of Minnesota researchers tapped the nearby Mississippi near St. Anthony Falls. Within three weeks ducks were raising families there, insects were buzzing and algae was growing, and researchers were starting experiments.

On Friday the public will get a rare tour of the lab, believed to be the only one in the world that has created an outdoor natural stream for research. On Wednesday, researchers gave a sneak preview.

Nearly half of the rivers in the nation are degraded and need help, said Fotis Sotiropoulos, director of the U's St. Anthony Falls Lab. "The effort to restore streams is a big business," he said. "It's about a billion dollars a year in business around the country."

The lab could provide better solutions for vexing problems. Engineers may need to remove unsafe dams, or install boulders to slow a river that's eating at a road. Or fisheries managers may want to reduce erosion that destroys fish spawning areas. Or farmers may want to change their practices to improve a stream's water quality, or stabilize stream banks.

Yet now, Sotiropoulos said, many of those projects fail.

"It's not trivial how you do this because you have to understand how the plants, fish, microorganisms, sediment and water that make up the entire ecosystem work and interact with each other," he said.

To study a natural system, yet one that could be controlled for experiments, scientists constructed the experimental stream in a limestone spillway used decades ago to divert river water away from St. Anthony Falls. They filled the former spillway with 5 feet of soil, seeded it with native plants and engineered a 165-foot stream.

The serpentine, 9-foot-wide waterway contains an identical set of riffles, or shoals, and a range of gravel, rock and sand in the streambed.

"We can dial in the amount of water we want to flow," said stream lab manager Anne Lightbody. "We can put in a flood. We can then repeat the flood as many times as we want to see whether we get the same effects."

Catwalks and planks allow researchers to move around without disturbing experiments. Numerous sensors send data to indoor computers via a wireless network.

One experiment uses a video camera mounted above the water to track where gravel-sized blue particles move in the stream at different flow rates. Another has piped in extra sediment to study how it affected insects living underwater on rocks.

The $600,000 project is a joint effort of St. Anthony Falls Lab and the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, a national technology center headquartered at the university.

Katie Kramarczuk, a biology major and recent graduate from the University of Puget Sound in Washington, said she jumped at the chance to be a research assistant at the stream restoration lab. "It's all about saving things for future generations," she said.

Tom Meersman • 612-673-7388

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