surrounded by protected forest, residents of ambodivohitra and land managers at the world wildlife foundation reveal how commodity crops and wood use affect on-the-ground conservation practices in the rainforests of northeast madagascar. 

learn more about the people and forests of madagascar in my story below:

we interviewed him to learn more about the initiative and the impacts the work can have on the environment and policies surrounding it.

q: how was the concept of the headwaters initiative formed?

a: i think one of the impetuses was trying to think of ways the domain is a unique asset to the university. it’s really important for them to try to establish and grow their imprint in their environmental programs among liberal arts universities. from a research perspective, the domain offers a lot of really unique opportunities because we own it and it’s so unimpacted by upstream effects; and because it all goes downstream it offers stewardship opportunities as well.

q: so, how are you monitoring these water systems? are you looking at their health? what are the impacts you’re protecting them from?

a: what we’re doing right now is laying the groundwork for more nuanced research in the future. no one has really in the past done a thorough characterization of the streams’ baseline data. we have censors in streams to log light, temperature, and tell us when the streams dry out. we have leaf litter bags to see how the environment is breaking down leaf litter and cycling carbon. what we were doing yesterday was bottling samples to get a snapshot of the stream water chemistry. it’s necessary if anyone wants to do anything more nuanced, like studying the effects of global warming: you have to know your baseline.

q: the southeast is, within north america, this big hotspot for freshwater biodiversity. why is it critical that sewanee look at its biodiversity and freshwater ecosystems?

a: well, because that makes it culturally important. it’s the salamander capital of the world right there in southern appalachia. but it’s also because animals all play their own role in their ecosystem here. if we decrease diversity there’s a good chance you can wreak havoc on some of these ecosystem services that we rely on animals for.

q: such as?

a: things like nutrient cycling, soil health, forest regeneration, trophic levels. if anyone around here is interested in hunting, those animals have to have something to feed on. like i said, soil health and forest regeneration: some of the little critters that hang out on the floor play a big role in seed dispersal and leaf litter breakdown that becomes fertilizer for the plant that grows that allows the deer to eat. the health of all of these systems, none of them are independent. it’s easier to compartmentalize them to study them, but they’re all interconnected.

q: a minute ago you called the southern appalachians the “salamander capital of the world”—

a yeah, they like to put that on coffee mugs in the smokies.

q ha! well, can you explain what bsal is and why sewanee is concerned about it?

a: yeah. bsal is essentially a form of chitrid, and a lot of people who are at least somewhat acquainted with amphibians know of chitrid came through and killed a lot of frog species, particularly in south america.

q: so, is this a viral disease?

a: no, it’s a fungal pathogen. all amphibians can breathe through their skin, and though some also have lungs, they all assimilate moisture and other things through their skin. because their skin stays wet the fungus will colonize it and cause them a lot of physiological stress.

more recently, i think it was 2014, they actually documented bsal in western europe that had been brought over from asia. a lot of animals coevolved with pathogens in their environment, but if you pick up a pathogen and move it somewhere—like in this case from asia to europe—it can completely wipe out whole populations.

because we have so many species here and the international pet trade is so thriving in atlanta, there’s big time concern among most scientists that its’s really a “when” not “if” situation for bsal to get introduced to the southern appalachians. it can cause all kinds of problems for the ecosystem services i talked about before… most people are preparing already for that. it would be sad for people like me, who are just big salamander fans, but it would be terrible for the ecosystem.

q: because the introduction of bsal is a “when” not “if” situation, how do you expect shi to contribute to monitoring bsal and preparing for its arrival?

a: well, we do the stream surveys. if certain species are found to be more vulnerable than others, we will know where they are and will recognize the areas that we’ll have to focus in on.

editor’s note: story four in our stories of alaska series focuses on the timber industry — one part of the resource-rich puzzle that is alaska — and the yearslong debate over the “roadless area conservation” rule, put in place by the usda in 2001, which disallows construction of any new road system in national forest land and effectively makes it impossible for companies to extract new resources that aren’t already accessible. click the story below to read more about the arguments for and against exemptions to the rule for alaska.

this was late july of 2017: exhausted from farm work and eager for a break in the shade, my coworkers and i were more than happy to indulge our manager in watching this menacing-looking fly lay her eggs.

the university farm in sewanee can afford these small breaks and experiments. subsidized by the university of the south, the farm was reestablished in 2012 as a research and hands-on learning opportunity for undergraduate students, like christopher hornsby, who has been intentionally breeding these ‘black soldier flies’ on the farm for over two years, harvesting their maggots.

these flies’ larvae are grown on a commercial scale across the united states for fish and chicken feed, but chris’s project focuses on what the larvae can feed on: once hatched, these larvae fatten for two weeks before emerging as adults, eating twice their own weight every 20-24 hours. to chris, and to many small farmers, this can be an invaluable service. reducing whatever mass of food waste given to them by ninety percent, the flies would expedite the university’s composting process by weeks, if not months, and allow the farm to accept 400-500 pounds of food waste from sewanee’s dining facilities every day.

an impressive metabolism hardly signifies the soldier fly as unique; most larvae can consume a large amount compared to their own mass. but many species’ adult flies can damage the local environment or become a nuisance to humans if their populations get out of hand, so it took a few weeks of research for chris to find the right fit for sewanee’s ecosystem.

“they’re very harmless,” chris explained; “when it becomes an adult fly it sheds the inner lining of its gut, expelling any hazardous microorganisms. and it loses its mouth. so it’s got no mouth, meaning it’s not a disease vector,  it’s not a crop pest, and they won’t swarm in houses, usually, unless you’ve got a mountain of food waste in there. and they die after two to three days.” he paused momentarily, and added almost as an afterthought,  “they’re also native to the entire western hemisphere. ”

but even this fly isn’t perfect. according to a pair of uga entomologists’ research from 1984, 99.6% of egg-laying takes place from 81.5° to 99.5°, and the university of windsor released a study from 2010 suggesting that the larvae’s ideal developmental environment has about 70% relative humidity. although a tennessee july easily provides these conditions, only tropical climates can host them year-round. the seasonality of the larvae may not be a problem to small farmers hoping to establish their own backyard colony because most agricultural systems dwindle as winter encroaches, anyway. but at sewanee, the converse is true: winter is when all 2,000 students are huddled together in the same dining hall, and it’s when the farm grows the most greens and accepts the most food waste. so chris’s project comes down to controlling climate, which would allow the flies’ reproduction and developmental cycle to continue through the farm’s busiest season.

chris and carolyn have worked on multiple prototypes for smaller weather-controlled breeding boxes, but in the summer of 2017 the university’s domain management raised a pole barn for the farm to house tractors, large equipment, and gave them the space to accommodate a room full of soldier flies. so chris’s project has shifted from research to construction, as he tries to plan and prepare an insulated and vermin-proof home for his maggots.

“i don’t know how to vermin-proof a building, but i’m learning. but it’s just me, and i can’t do that kind of construction on my own. if i had more time and more people and more skills… it would all be very helpful.”

since he graduates in 2019, chris’s project might not be completed soon enough for him to see it. with preliminary research finished and finding success in smaller-scale larvae breeding, now he needs to build the larvae a home. as a full-time student he can only work eight hours a week on the farm, which limits a project that is now so contingent on major construction work.

however close his graduation looms, he is confident that another student will bear the torch after him. once it’s finished, he sees sewanee’s waste management system as a model that can be used by other small farms across the country, like bill keener’s sequatchie cove farm.

keener, a dairy, poultry, and vegetable farmer outside of sewanee, is intrigued by chris’s work. sold at first by the prospect of self-producing chicken feed, he’s now hoping to do research about a small-scale implementation of a soldier fly colony in his farmland.

“maybe i could find an easy and big enough source of food waste to feed them with. maybe i could talk to local public schools.”

keener typically feeds his hogs excess whey from his dairy operation, and if the public school falls through as a food source, he may be able to use the whey as a substrate for soldier fly growth. the soldier flies would create an organic alternative to grain chicken feed, which would lower the price of his organic eggs and increase his competitivity in the local organic market.

“i think it’s a good project for me. for a homestead, it’d just make sense.”

established as a collaborative research project between the university of georgia and the university of the south, a suite of professors, undergraduates, and graduate students constructed these wetlands in 2016 to discover whether or not they could be a cost-effective way to remove pharmaceuticals from wastewater.

dug out of what was historically a barren garbage heap, this pond, and two more beside it, are continually filled and drained with wastewater from the sewanee utility district. sud, as it’s locally known, is a water treatment facility for franklin and marion counties in tennessee. a few meters away from these wetlands are three huge lagoons of wastewater. sud filters water through the lagoons one at a time, using bacteria, algae, and microorganisms to process waste, while the wetlands “polish off” this treated water using larger freshwater vegetation. once the water has taken its 75-day trip through all three lagoons, it’s sprayed across 62 acres of surrounding forest, a relatively common practice called “land application.” the sprayed water is up to epa standards, but the epa’s wastewater policy doesn’t address pharmaceutical pollution.

pharmaceuticals are a water quality concern globally: “if you live downstream from a city that’s discharging their treated wastewater effluent into a river, and you draw your municipal drinking water from that river, you are getting a cocktail of low concentrations of pharmaceutical compounds,” explains dr. deb mcgrath, a biology professor for sewanee and one of the heads of the constructed wetland project.

on top of the cumberland plateau and downstream from no one, pharmaceuticals haven’t been a major concern for the sud or sewanee residents until recently. in the past ten years alone, sewanee has experienced two fifty-year droughts that nearly dried up neighboring towns completely. weather patterns have become more variable as the effects of climate change intensify, and communities across the globe are shifting to a precedent of water scarcity with intermittent events of extreme flooding.

ben beavers, the director of the sud, is concerned by this. at a public panel on water research and business in sewanee, beavers said that the most important water-related issue he faces is having enough source water. trying not to sound too foreboding, he told the audience: “we may or may not have enough water in the future, so we are continually planning for that.”

for many, these wetlands are the solution: outside of atlanta, georgia, over 263 acres of wetlands polish off the pharmaceuticals found in clayton county’s treated wastewater, and recycle up to 17.4 million gallons of water a day for the city. during the second-worst drought in georgia history in 2007, clayton county was able to keep their raw reservoirs of water at 77% capacity, all because of their sustainable water cycle.

these wetlands are effective on large scales, but mcgrath and dr. ron carroll are concerned with the efficacy of these projects on a smaller scale; could they be implemented in small water treatment facilities, possibly saving rural areas from water scarcity in the future?

so far, the preliminary data suggests so. nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations, as well as e. coli colonies, decrease substantially as they pass through the three wetlands, making the water quality well within tennessee’s standards for fish and aquatic life. since 2016, they’ve tracked over 30 pharmaceutical compounds, and mcgrath assured that “preliminary research, both at larger scales and even at our wetland, shows that wetland processes–and especially the combination of plants, bacteria, and light–are pretty effective at breaking down a lot of these.”

if their data suggests significant improvement in water quality, smaller water treatment centers across the united states and even globally can implement water recycling through constructed wetlands, without sacrificing over 60 acres of land.

“if we can show that wetland processes, liter for liter of water are more effective per unit of land, it’d be something municipalities would be very interested in adopting.”

although the research seems hopeful, dr. deborah mcgrath and uga environmental lawyer dr. laurie fowler are also dealing with the public face of the project. the public outreach campaign that surrounds the constructed wetlands ranges from an informational website to hosting field days for local adults, as well as high and elementary school students, inviting them to visit and learn about the wetlands.

sewanee’s water system is incredibly pure. most residents have the luxury of knowing exactly where their drinking water comes from, and many are within walking distance to at least one of the rain-fed reservoirs in town. with most of the local population aware of their drinking water’s uncorrupted history, there has been some resistance to the idea of willingly using wastewater as a drinking source.

mcgrath and fowler have been working to counteract that negativity by showing the public the intrinsic beauty that the wetlands can have; dressed with native freshwater vegetation, butterflies, a booming presence of amphibians and birds, the wetlands could be considered one of the most beautiful pockets of biodiversity on campus.

in order to create sustainable water systems for a likely water-scarce future, the public’s conceptual approach to wastewater needs to shift from disgust to at least begrudging acceptance. backed by research and the aesthetic of a healthy wetland, mcgrath hopes this project can achieve that.

“people think a lot about the glass of water that they drink, but they don’t think anything about where their water goes after they’ve used it. it’s a huge link to sustainable water use. these wetlands are as much an educational and outreach facility as they are a research facility.”