LINKING SEDIMENTOLOGY AND LOCAL WATER QUALITY ISSUES IN A TEAM-TAUGHT UNDERGRADUATE SEDIMENTOLOGY AND STRATIGRAPHY COURSE AT WINONA STATE UNIVERSITY, MN

Minnesota's citizens voted in 2008 to amend the state constitution to impose a 25-year sales-tax increase that provides funding to the arts and environmental preservation. These Minnesota Clean Water, Land and Legacy funds are dedicated to assessing, restoring and protecting MN's waterways, which will, in turn, provide job and research opportunities for geoscientists. To prepare our students to compete for these resources and to work as good stewards of MN's water resources, we have redesigned our traditional sedimentology/stratigraphy class to focus on the critical role that sedimentology plays in assessing waterway health, particularly as related to total maximum daily load studies.

We describe here our approach to the redesigned course, which is being offered for the first time in spring 2009. We have motivated students by situating our treatment of sediment-transport dynamics in the context of sediment and turbidity controls in area streams. Many of southeastern MN's sediment-related water-quality problems result from widespread agricultural activities in upland areas. Mitigating these problems requires identification of sediment sources into, and pathways along, streams so that these conduits can be isolated and water-quality can be restored. Since other agricultural chemicals, including nutrients, herbicides and pesticides, are likely to move in concert with the sediment, mitigating sediment-transport problems has the potential to mitigate other contaminants.

To prepare students to tackle these complex problems, faculty with expertise in sedimentology and watershed dynamics have designed learning activities that integrate our disciplinary perspectives. Students work with stream tables in the laboratory to model stream-bank stability and the impact of varying flow conditions on channel morphology and sediment loads. This allows students to model and assess the effects of various agricultural best management practices (BMPs) on stream-bank stability. They study sediment-transport dynamics in a laboratory flume and in streams to quantify the relationship between sediment load and flow parameters. Field investigations of local streams provide students an opportunity to observe the effectiveness of BMPs and the influence of landuse on sediment entrainment and transport.