Siena University students have built a floating wetland as part of a project meant to improve the water quality of Little’s Lake.
Little’s Lake is nestled in a small clearing on the east side of Van Rensselaer Boulevard, about five minutes from the university’s Loudonville campus.
Siena senior Isabelle Rowley grew up swimming in the lake – her father was even a lifeguard.
Over the summer, Rowley and her professor Dr. Mary Beth Kolozsvary were trapping turtles in Little’s as part of an unrelated project when Rowley had an idea.
“I said that the water quality was declining as she said a lot of duckweed, a lot of algae so I was saying we should try to build a floating wetland and the conversation kind of sparked there and then as I got back to school, she said ‘hey let’s make this an independent study,’ and I was like sure,” Rowley said.
As it stands, the lake is home to an abundance of duckweed – a small aquatic plant with leaves that look like a three-leaf clover, but instead of a stem extending into the ground, a tiny root stretches into the water.
Duckweed may look like algae to the untrained eye.
As Dr. Kolozsvary explains, duckweed is exceptional at extracting nutrients like nitrogen. And, because Little’s Lake is so close to Albany and other residential areas, water runoff making its way into the lake results in an overabundance of nutrients – enabling the plant to thrive a little too well.
“Over time we’ve got a lot of urbanizing areas, you’ve got lawns, you’ve got fertilizer coming in there, lots of other nutrients that gets fed into the lake,” Kolozsvary said.
As part of the independent study, Rowley researched which plants would be best suited to remove the nutrients.
“My whole job in this was to try to find a model that was good, like a wetland that worked,” Rowley said.
The idea being that plants on the floating wetland would absorb nutrients in the lake, meaning other plants like duckweed would have a smaller pool of resources to extract from, therefore reducing its population.
The wetland has been floating atop the lake’s surface since June and contains four different plants – swamp milkweed, shallow sedge, blue flag iris and pickerelweed.
Kolozsvary says while one wetland is not enough to transform the entire lake, promising results could justify building more wetlands that could improve water quality.
“If this works out well it could become a model for other similar lakes and situations, it’s too early to tell, we don’t know,” Kolozsvary said.
The Siena researchers use row boats owned by the Weare C. Little Memorial Park Association to collect water samples and check on the conditions of the wetland and its plants.
The university has partnered with the nonprofit association to facilitate the project. The association’s Board President Jon Teale hopes the research will help clean up the lake.
“It’s fairly healthy, but we want to make sure that we maintain a healthy body of water, in order for us to do that and make decisions as a board we need the data,” Teale said.
The three-year project will continue after Rowley graduates, but next steps are not yet clear. Everything depends on the results.
“As a student, I’ve never had this kind of like hands-on experience, I’ve had very rewarding and cool labs at Siena that really propelled me and wanted to be in this field but this is the first time I was like wow ‘I really love my major and this is what a future career could look like,” Rowley said.
