Researchers involved in a CU-Boulder outreach program aimed at assessing the extent of mercury contamination in the reservoirs, lakes, and streams of southwestern Colorado were recently awarded a $690,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to expand their research on the effect of fire on the mobility of mercury in forest soils.

The Four Corners area is home to a half-dozen coal-burning power plants, and even though they have all worked hard to reduce mercury emissions, mercury deposition is still high downwind of these plants. All of the major reservoirs in southwestern Colorado now have "fish consumption advisories" for mercury. And in 2003, the Missionary Ridge fire just east of Durango exacerbated the problem. Fires result in large increases in soil erosion, and when the sediments of the charred landscape washed into Vallecito Reservoir after the Missionary Ridge fire, the mercury concentrations in the sediments and water increased dramatically.

With funding from CU-Boulder’s Outreach Committee, Professor Joseph N. Ryan, Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, has spent the past two years assisting the Mountain Studies Institute and the Pine River Watershed Group with sampling, analysis and evaluation of mercury in reservoirs, lakes and streams in the southwestern Colorado region. The NSF proposal was a result of this collaboration.

Ryan will serve as the principal investigator for the NSF-funded project.  Co-principal investigators include Kathryn Nagy, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago; Koren Nydick, executive director of the Mountain Studies Institute; and George Aiken of the U.S. Geological Survey.

In addition to expanding sampling, analysis and evaluation activities, this initiative will bolster the efforts of the San Juan Collaboratory. The collaboratory brings together the resources of CU-Boulder, Fort Lewis College, the Mountain Studies Institute, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service in Durango to coordinate multi-disciplinary research efforts to serve the needs of rural Southwestern Colorado. It also offers on-site learning opportunities at the undergraduate and graduate levels by building bridges between educational institutions and community groups.