SCALABLE AND SUSTAINABLE SERVICE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES RELATED TO STREAM MANAGEMENT

Stream management is a continuous, interdisciplinary task, shared between local, state, and federal agencies, conservation groups, conservancy districts, and individuals within the community. It involves teachable moments in response to singular events like floods or a land-use decision as well as opportunities for long-term engagement in planning, implementing, and assessing management practices at spatial scales ranging from a stream reach to the contributing watershed. Because of the varied duration, recurrence, and scale of these opportunities, stream management is a rich and sustainable area for research, teaching, and service. At Wittenberg, service learning associated with local stream- and watershed-based research have become an explicit focus in geology and environmental science courses. Buck Creek is an integral part of our community, supplying power to mills early in its history but also serving as its historical water source and as an outlet for wastewater. It is channelized, constrained by roads and utilities, impacted by combined sewer overflow, and its flow regulated upstream by a flood-control reservoir, but the land associated with Buck Creek and its riparian corridor is publicly-held, recreational, green space managed by a conservancy district. Wittenberg faculty and students have been involved in numerous activities including collecting baseline data for a stream resource protection plan, providing flow data to recreationists, evaluating the potential for a wetland mitigation bank, selecting a stream mitigation site, assessing benefits of lowhead dam modifications, measuring efficacy of stormwater retention in rain gardens, and partnering in efforts to rehabilitate eroded stream reaches. Service learning experiences have been associated with each of these activities, from short field discussions or data collection in a general education class of non-science majors to multi-year research projects for majors. While our geoscientific thinking and expertise may not replace the need for professional services and certifications, our engagement in stream management helps identify critical issues, frame key questions, collect baseline data, evaluate professional plans and analyses, and assess installed practices, making us a valued stakeholder in management decisions.