Tl;dr: It seems the group was well intentioned but this actually could have been pretty environmentally detrimental.
According to this article, it appears the issue is the team used a digger in some capacity. Details on how are sparse.
I’m a microbiologist (environmental micro), but I studied a few things in grad school. A big chunk was hydrology and riverine engineering, more specifically erosion control and environmental remediation. I promptly went on to work in a different field, because who does what they actually study in university?
I’ll spare you the details (unless you want them, I will go HAM on erosion control autistic data dumping because I rarely get to talk about this) but it’s pretty easy to fuck up a river if you start digging it up. Given they mentioned flooding concerns, I checked to see if the area is in a flood plain and confirmed it is.
Humans engineer rivers in floodplains to prevent the previously cyclical flooding as well as reduce erosion. If those controls are damaged, the flooding and erosion can resume, and downstream effects (…pun?) can be pretty serious for humans and the environment.
I’d need more information to confirm exactly what happened, but there may be some merit to the complaints about their project. If they didn’t have even a cursory environmental impact assessment, they could have done a lot of damage while trying to do something good.
That is good context, and I’ve seen first hand well-intentioned work have unintended consequences like you describe.
I guess I had assumed that they were just hauling out debris with the diggers, but if they were changing the topology of the riverbed and surrounding floodplain, I could see that causing flooding or other problems.
You mentioned microbial composition; do you think that judicious use of digging equipment like I had assumed would be damaging to the microbiome, or only if they were indeed dredging?
It really depends on a lot of factors, including water quality, substrate composition, and the extent of the digging. The majority of microbial activity in most waterways isn’t in the water, but instead in a region called the hyporheic zone, a surprisingly thin layer of sediment at the interface between surface and ground water.
Digging and dredging both are fantastic ways to disrupt this layer. Microbial communities will redevelop rapidly, but their composition will be different. The makeup of the stream/riverbed will have significantly changed; different types of microbes reproduce at different rates, with fast reproducers initially crowding out slower growers; and the products of the activity of some microbes provide the conditions under which other types of microbes can flourish. The composition will change over time and may take months or even years to return to a steady state, and even then that state may be quite different than before digging or dredging.
Tl;dr: It seems the group was well intentioned but this actually could have been pretty environmentally detrimental.
According to this article, it appears the issue is the team used a digger in some capacity. Details on how are sparse.
I’m a microbiologist (environmental micro), but I studied a few things in grad school. A big chunk was hydrology and riverine engineering, more specifically erosion control and environmental remediation. I promptly went on to work in a different field, because who does what they actually study in university?
I’ll spare you the details (unless you want them, I will go HAM on erosion control autistic data dumping because I rarely get to talk about this) but it’s pretty easy to fuck up a river if you start digging it up. Given they mentioned flooding concerns, I checked to see if the area is in a flood plain and confirmed it is.
Humans engineer rivers in floodplains to prevent the previously cyclical flooding as well as reduce erosion. If those controls are damaged, the flooding and erosion can resume, and downstream effects (…pun?) can be pretty serious for humans and the environment.
I’d need more information to confirm exactly what happened, but there may be some merit to the complaints about their project. If they didn’t have even a cursory environmental impact assessment, they could have done a lot of damage while trying to do something good.
That is good context, and I’ve seen first hand well-intentioned work have unintended consequences like you describe.
I guess I had assumed that they were just hauling out debris with the diggers, but if they were changing the topology of the riverbed and surrounding floodplain, I could see that causing flooding or other problems.
You mentioned microbial composition; do you think that judicious use of digging equipment like I had assumed would be damaging to the microbiome, or only if they were indeed dredging?
It really depends on a lot of factors, including water quality, substrate composition, and the extent of the digging. The majority of microbial activity in most waterways isn’t in the water, but instead in a region called the hyporheic zone, a surprisingly thin layer of sediment at the interface between surface and ground water.
Digging and dredging both are fantastic ways to disrupt this layer. Microbial communities will redevelop rapidly, but their composition will be different. The makeup of the stream/riverbed will have significantly changed; different types of microbes reproduce at different rates, with fast reproducers initially crowding out slower growers; and the products of the activity of some microbes provide the conditions under which other types of microbes can flourish. The composition will change over time and may take months or even years to return to a steady state, and even then that state may be quite different than before digging or dredging.