Coleman Wasik is an associate professor in the Department of Plant and Earth Science at UW–River Falls. Her research interests include how human activity impacts the transport of nutrients and other contaminants through natural systems. The ultimate goal of her work is to understand how human activities benefit from natural processes while also lessening their impacts on natural systems.
Nitrate contamination of groundwater in Wisconsin affects the health of rural residents and the bottom-line of farming operations. This proposal seeks funding to initiate a collaboration between UWRF and UW–Madison faculty with the objective of improving our understanding of how and whether nitrate concentrations fluctuate in wells in response to factors such as rain events and nutrient management practices. The long-term outcome of the collaboration will be the development and deployment of continuous nitrate monitoring systems in residential and farm wells across western Wisconsin. In the near term we seek support to grow an existing well water-quality database, collect additional geochemical information on a subset of wells that will have continuous monitors installed, and allow faculty and students from the two institutions to grow their nascent collaboration. This project will leverage data from the ongoing well monitoring program that the proposal PI has carried out with the farmer-led Western Wisconsin Conservation Council (WWCC) for the last seven years. We will identify wells with nitrate concentration that vary on a seasonal basis for additional geochemical characterization and continuous monitoring. Faculty in mechanical engineering and soil science from UW–Madison will begin to design and test continuous monitoring systems with feedback from the proposal PI and WWCC members. Ultimately, we seek to develop a system that empowers rural communities to track their nitrate exposure in real-time and to identify areas where changes in nutrient management will have immediate positive effects for well water quality.