command and control

I'm learning more about Logan County, Ohio.

It turns out that there is public land adjacent to the Hine's emerald dragonfly type locality. Indian Lake State Park wraps just about all the way around the man-made lake, created about 1851. The state lands come very close to where the dragonflies were collected in 1929-1930, and they were state lands at that time. I've found only coarse-scale maps thus far, best guess is that the type locality is a few hundred feet outside the public land boundary.

Taking a closer look at Google Earth, it's evident that the dredged channel is now much wider than the 20 feet described by E. B. Williamson in 1931. It's more like 50 feet wide now, almost all the way up to the bridge. According to a newsletter I found, the North Fork is scheduled to be dredged again in 2011. Apparently, there are two dredges working pretty much every year in Indian Lake and vicinity.

Then, I found "Indian Lake State Park's Natural Resource Management Plan, 2007-2012" posted online. If I read it literally, it's a metaphor of everything wrong with natural land management practices in America.

I can't find any evidence that park management knows that a federally listed dragonfly was first described from their backyard. There's an appendix with species lists for just about everything except dragonflies, although it's much more thorough for some taxa than for others.

Resource management goal #2 is to "continue to use the Lake Management Plan and Lake Dredging Plan to monitor, control, and protect the lake and lakeshore areas." So basically, never-ending dredging is official policy. That's necessary because:

"Indian Lake, a shallow lake with a dirt or silt bottom, is the ultimate downstream destination of the 63,000+ acres of residential and agricultural land that comprise the watershed. Sediment entering the lake over the past 100 years threatened the future of the recreational value of Indian Lake and property values around the lake and surrounding community, not to mention the loss of productive farm ground. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) had operated a suction dredge in the lake, as money allowed, for nearly 30 years to remove sediment. The cost of this operation had risen to over $300,000 per year." (from Appendix 1 of the Resource Management Plan).

The situation improved somewhat after 1987 with the onset of no-till farming practices and reduced upstream erosion, and with formation of a "Development Commission" to help raise funds for dredging. Yet the dredging continues, and no cost is given.

Let's go back to the beginning, and look at the sequence of events and how things got to where they are.

Prior to Euro-American settlement, the North Fork of the Great Miami River meanders through swamp woodlands, it's dynamic course depositing sediment within the relatively low-gradient valley. Sediment loads would have been low relative to modern times because of nearly complete ground vegetation cover. Thus, the 1800s valley represented over 12,000 years of post-glacial sediment deposition.

1851, dam construction begins. By 1857 the lower North Fork and the confluence with the South Fork are inundated by the rising lake.

Surrounding lands are cleared for agriculture, greatly increasing erosion and runoff. Water quality suffers, and the North Fork in most recent accounts is rated as "non-attainment" by OEPA. The greatly increased sediment load begins to fill the already shallow Indian Lake, and eventually frequent dredging becomes necessary to support recreational use of the lake.

Dredging gradually extends up the North Fork. In 1929, a 20-foot wide channel extended to a quarter-mile below the SR 117 bridge, according to Williamson. In a 2006 air photo, the channel is closer to 50-feet wide almost up to the bridge, and at least 20 feet wide above the bridge. The channel is straightened, bypassing the sinuous historic meanders.

Channelization moves more sediment, more quickly and more efficiently, from the farm fields into the lake. Soon the dredging operations increase to keep up. When the North Fork itself begins to clog, it is dredged again, as it apparently will be next year. This will once again allow efficient sediment transport into the lake.

This is 1950s command-and-control thinking, tempered slightly by late 1980s no-till agriculture. And it's all being subsidized by the taxpayers of Ohio.

I suppose it could be argued that it creates jobs for a couple of dredge operators, a few truck drivers who transport the sludge tainted by agricultural pesticides to wherever it is they take it, and a few bureaucrats who handle the paper.

Natural ecological processes had addressed this by creating, over time, a wide floodplain where excess sediment was deposited by a meanding channel. The meanders and the lower gradient channel slowed floodwaters, allowing sediment to deposit. The adjoining swamp forest and resulting woody debris input further filtered sediments. If a channel began to fill, it migrated laterally. A dynamic equilibrium held for millenia.

The "efficient" humans came along, and messed everything up in less than 100 years. Now we're fighting a never ending battle to maintain that disequilibrium. Somewhere along the way, we extirpated a population of a rare dragonfly, and who knows how many other things.

If not for the subdivision in the way, and the stubborn human attitudes, this could all be put back for the cost of perhaps a decade of dredging. The road is no real obstacle, it could be raised or the bridge widened. The original channel course could be determined from old maps and photos, it could be re-established and the old straight channel filled, and wet-tolerant trees and shrubs planted or allowed to naturally regenerate. The sediment load into the lake would immediately drop dramatically, because it would instead deposit on the floodplain. Hydrology studies could determine how much the water would back up in a 100-year event, and if necessary some additional floodway capacity could be excavated to prevent damage to upstream property. The permits and design to do all this would be of moderate complexity at most. There would be a short term (a few years) creation of engineering, environmental, and construction jobs, and because of transportation costs local firms would likely do most of the actual construction work with direct benefits to the local economy.

But first, a little imagination and creativity is required. This is the key first step, the place where restoration starts.

the land has a story to tell

Last month I visited a friend in Springfield, Ohio. Driving out from Chicago, I chose not to take the Interstate, and took smaller roads instead. Coming in from the northwest, entering Logan County, I recalled that there had once been a Hine's emerald dragonfly locality nearby.

The next morning I found time to go online and do a little searching. My memory had been accurate; the type locality had been in Logan County, near Indian Lake. That's about all I was able to find without getting back to my files which were 2,000+ miles away. So at the end of the trip, I did enough recon to get a sense of the land north of Springfield (more on that later) and filed it away for future action.

This morning at the office I was working on an entirely different aspect of the Hine's emerald dragonfly, which is a federally endangered species. Mostly it was number crunching, calculating density estimates for a major field study I'd led in Illinois over the summer. There, a dozen or more Hine's emerald dragonfly populations persist while in Logan County Ohio no one has seen the species since 1930. However, in writing up a tech memo with todays analysis, I had occasion to pull out the original description of the species, published in 1931.

In that paper, E. B. Williamson provides an unusually thorough description (for that time) of the type locality. He says:

“Ohio State Road Number 117 crosses the North Fork of the Little Miami River north of Huntsville, Ohio. The North Fork is a small stream at the bridge, only a few feet wide and at the season we were there carrying but little water. From its source a mile or two above the bridge it meanders through open and pastured fields in an almost flat terrain of clay soil. Below the bridge there are some willows, adjacent thickets, a few trees, and long, dense growths of lizard-tail through which the water winds its way, often concealed by the abundant vegetation. This condition passes abruptly after about a quarter of a mile into a deep dredged channel about 20 feet wide, which extends into Indian Lake. The upper end of the dredged channel, possibly a quarter to a half mile in length, is in heavy swamp woods, winding through which is the old channel of the creek, now reduced to pools of greater or lesser length.

In this woods is a heronry which Professor Hine visited on June 7, 1929. Leaving the woods along its northern side where it adjoins a golf course, he saw a dragonfly hovering two or three feet above the ground in an open spot under a bush."

A week later, James S. Hine and C. H. Kennedy returned to the site:

“The day was rainy and apparently unfavorable. They failed to find any Somatochlora in the woods, but on visiting the dredged channel they were able to take five specimens resting on low bushes on the wood’s side of the high bank of earth thrown up by the dredge when the channel was dug."

A total of six specimens were collected in 1929, and only one in 1930 despite searches by a larger group. It appears that the dredge activity had recently disrupted the habitat, and that the collectors found the final remnants of a dying population.

On a 2006 Google Earth photo, the type locality is easy to locate. There is now a dredged channel to a point well above the bridge. North of the stream and west of SR 117 is a residential subdivision, and across from this is a narrow wooded band and then open farmland. Downstream is an extensive woodland extending all the way to Indian Lake, and within the woodland several old channel scars are visible. Depending on which channel was active in 1929, the specimens were collected either near the subdivision-woodland boundary, or a short distance into what is now woodland. There is currently no evidence of a golf course, although it’s possible that the subdivision occupies the former location.

Here's what I'm able to determine from Williamson's description, a look at that Google Earth photo, and (just now) a look at a detailed surficial geology map of the region:

The site is associated with the headwaters of the Great Miami River drainage, and specifically with the north fork;

Most of the surrounding land has been dramatically altered, with the possible exception of some woods on the downstream end that don't appear to be of very good quality;

The North Fork appears to be much more extensively dredged now than in 1930;

As with most other known Hine's emerald dragonfly localities, the site is underlain by dolomite bedrock. Unlike most of those other sites, at the Logan County locality the bedrock is covered by anywhere from 150 to 250 feet of glacial till, outwash, and alluvium;

Sand and gravel outwash deposits just north of the channel appear to be the most likely source of groundwater, however the site appears to be relatively level;

Organic deposits are prevalent between SR 117 and Indian Lake in the vicinity of the channel, with alluvium up channel and till to the south;

There is no evidence of suitable remaining habitat anywhere in the immediate vicinity of the type locality.

Chasing down additional detail would most likely require a return visit to Ohio. The oldest photos I can find online date to 1994, and these show conditions similar to those in the 2006 photo mentioned above. Normally, air photos are available from as early as the mid to late 1930s, and getting a look at these, and at any slightly older maps of the area, would be among the highest priorities to reconstruct historic conditions. Of course, there's no substitute for actually walking the land.

What little I've learned thus far has raised some interesting questions. First, this place is quite different than the other populations I've visited. Understanding the type locality may shed light on the overall habitat requirements of the species, and may assist with restoration efforts elsewhere.

Would restoration be possible at the type locality? In theory, probably. In practice, any serious attempt to restore hydrology might very well flood the adjacent subdivision. There is also, as far as I can tell, no publicly owned land to start from. Then there are the genetic issues, with the nearest source populations hours away by car.

Next, some thoughts on what I saw during my too-brief visit to the area. In the meantime, there's more on the Hine's emerald dragonfly on my web site