Fish Gotta Swim

Stetson University water research
Stetson University water research
Professor Kirsten Work, Ph.D., (holding net on left) works with students on research to help protect Florida’s freshwater resources.

by Bill Noblitt

Looking out over the Atlantic Ocean from New Smyrna Beach, you can almost feel exotic Africa, the birthplace of hurricanes, just over the horizon. The sea’s vast scale dwarfs you. It’s like looking into the clear night sky filled with the bewildering Milky Way.

One truth, however, is not bewildering. More than one kind of water connects Africa on one side and North America on the other. Dwindling freshwater resources also bind them together as it does many of the continents on this Earth.

According to an article in The Nation titled “The Water Crisis Comes Home,” for example, a U.N. report warns that by 2030 “demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent.”

As the saying goes, however, all problems are local. Use Google Earth to zoom into North America and then drill down into green Florida. With its rainy summers and land dotted with rivers, lakes and springs, it’s hard to imagine the state facing a water problem like the rest of the continent.

But it does.

The Floridan Aquifer, which blooms beneath Stetson’s I-4 corridor campuses, anchors this reflection on water. Tremendous population growth threatens the aquifer. The delicate groundwater also faces a saltwater backwash.

Responsible for much of Florida’s fresh water, the aquifer bends until it almost breaks to serve our area. In the future, it may not be able to.

Stetson recently created the Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience to study the issue. The university hired noted environmental policy expert Clay Henderson as the water institute’s first executive director. The Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center at Lake Beresford will be the institute’s living laboratory.

This is a story about the water institute and its broad mission. However, it’s also a story about how four people from different backgrounds — a donor, a dean, a scientist and an environmentalist — came together to give the institute life.

Focus on Water Research

The institute, a first of its kind at Stetson, will focus on water and environmental research in order to offer policy options to protect our water supply and our other natural resources here in Central Florida and beyond.

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Professors Melissa Gibbs, Ph.D. (far right) and Kirsten Work, Ph.D. (next to Gibbs), work with students on catfish research in Florida’s Blue Spring State Park.

“The institute will help bring together faculty and student research in collaboration with community partners to look at big picture issues affecting our environment,” says Henderson, a 1977 Stetson graduate. “It will include all Stetson colleges and campuses and be truly interdisciplinary.”

Henderson understands the importance of the Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience. If it is to unravel this complex problem, he says, “The region needs a water institute to focus the research that will lead us to policy options.”

Specifically, the Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience will focus on student and faculty research, community engagement and experiential learning, along with strong public policy, community education and recreation components. It will also involve the community in symposia and educational workshops.

Where did Henderson get his passion to preserve the environment? It happened after law school when he returned home to New Smyrna Beach. He saw how quickly overdevelopment had transformed his home and Central Florida. He wanted to do something.

“Some outstanding environmental leaders, such as Reid Hughes, Doris Leeper and Walter Boardman, took me under their wings,” Henderson remembers. “We focused on strategies to save our special areas in Volusia County.”

The result was protection of more than 300,000 acres of conservation lands that preserve beaches, estuaries, rivers, lakes and springs.

“Now these areas can become living laboratories for restoring habitat and protecting watersheds,” Henderson explains.

Clay Henderson, Stetson University
Clay Henderson

For the past 15 years, he has been senior counsel at the national law firm of Holland & Knight, focusing on environmental and water law. Before that, he served as president of the Florida Audubon Society, one of the nation’s oldest conservation organizations. He has also worked for The Nature Conservancy and The Trust for Public Land.

Henderson’s Stetson roots are deep.

He remembers his father, Odis Henderson ’52, as someone who was a part of the “greatest generation” who fought in World War II and attended college on the GI Bill.

After his father died, Henderson’s grandmother showed him a box of what she called “saved keepsakes.” In it was an essay his father had written for his English composition class titled “Why I Came to Stetson.”

“I came to Stetson to get the best education possible so that I could return to the place of my kin and improve the lives of those who live there,” his father wrote.

Henderson carried that essay with him as a Stetson freshman and under his robes on graduation day. He read it as part of his student commencement address.

“We have the capability to focus a tremendous amount of brainpower to enrich the lives of those around us,” he says now, “and restore the environment that we share with all other living things.”

Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center

A key part of the water institute will be the new Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center at Lake Beresford. Sandra Stetson’s $6 million Aquatic Center gift will build a water research facility and provide a home for the university’s crew teams.

There are deep roots here too. Sandra, a great-granddaughter of Stetson University’s namesake, John B. Stetson, has long supported garden, wetland and environmental efforts. The new Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center further fulfills that passion.

Additionally, some in her family have rowed crew, so she has a real connection to the sport of sculling. As Stetson University President Wendy B. Libby, Ph.D., points out: “Her gift allows us to put recreation and research together under one roof.”

Sandra Stetson Martinuzzi
Sandra Stetson Martinuzzi

Libby says the gift to create the Aquatic Center also “strengthens our connection with the family that assured our continuation in the late 1800s.” After all, it was John B. Stetson who contributed his financial support to the institution after founder Henry A. DeLand suffered economic setbacks during a severe freeze in his orange groves.

“The Aquatic Center is going to make a major difference in what we do,” declares Karen Ryan, Ph.D., dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Ryan notes that the new Aquatic Center is more than a place for science. She envisions a facility where Stetson students can take advantage of the center’s recreational opportunities, including canoeing and kayaking.

Another component, according to Ryan, is a community outreach and education function.

“The center will host workshops and seminars where noted environmental and policy speakers will give us their viewpoints,” she says. “And this new facility will help us marry science with policy creation. Our students need to be grounded in both.”

In addition, the new Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center at Lake Beresford will serve as the water institute’s research arm. Particularly, public policy and environmental science students will take advantage of on-campus labs and classes while pursuing field study at the Aquatic Center.

“The Aquatic Center will fundamentally change the Stetson student experience with opportunities to get outside and on the water,” Henderson says.

A Worldwide Problem

The water crisis, The Nation article warns, is now at the country’s front doorstep. “The price of water in 30 major U.S. cities is rising faster than most other household staples —

40 percent since 2010, with no end in sight,” according to Circle of Blue, a water-focused group of leading journalists and scientists. The Nation article’s author, Maude Barlow, writes that water cutoffs are growing across the country. So, Florida is not alone. It’s part of a worldwide problem.

Can it be solved?

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A Stetson student holds a catfish that has been tagged for research purposes.

“Florida’s water problem exists because there are too many people consuming too much water,” asserts Wendy Anderson, Ph.D., professor and chair of Environmental Science and Studies at Stetson. “Salt water intrusion into the Floridan Aquifer is irreversible, so every drop of fresh water that is pumped out of the aquifer only draws more salt water into it.

“Florida’s only hope is to figure out how to capture and store more fresh water above ground — something that is quite hard to do with its sandy surface,” she adds.

Although many environmental studies professors and other faculty are affiliated with the institute, Stetson hired Anderson specifically to lead the charge to bring the university-wide, interdisciplinary institute to fruition.

“Wendy Anderson co-chaired with me the search committee for an institute executive director and was also instrumental in developing the proposal for it,” says Ryan.

Anderson will chair the Faculty Steering Committee for the water institute, working closely with Henderson to define research and outreach priorities.

Anderson first got involved with this kind of research as a graduate student when she studied plant uptake of nitrogen in upland forests in Tennessee. But one day she found herself studying plants in a land habitat that is surrounded by and impacted by a marine environment. It was her Vanderbilt professor who pulled her in that direction by requesting her help in unraveling an important question about marine nutrients in Baja California, Mexico.

“It’s all about the connections between the two ecosystems — ocean and land,” she says now. From the hills of Tennessee, she found herself the only plant biologist among a group of animal ecologists in Baja. “It was so much fun to explore the detailed chemistry and physiology of plants in this environment,” she recalls. Anderson has continued to follow this line of questioning throughout her career.

Today, although trained as a plant biologist, her research has evolved to focus on questions about the movement of nutrients and organisms from land to water and from water to land. She works on small islands in the Gulf of California and the San Juan Islands of Washington state, where marine-derived nutrients impact soil chemistry and the physiology and diversity of plants and animals.

“To put it simply,” she says, “it’s about how the digested fish in the form of seabird guano fertilizes the plants.”

She now plans to explore similar questions along the St. Johns River system, the Indian River Lagoon and coastal dune systems.

A Breakthrough Idea

Although the water institute touches all Stetson campuses and their faculty and students, the “breakthrough” idea for its creation began in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Henderson remembers a Stetson water institute being “kicked around” more than 20 years ago. “The idea came back to the surface when we did our visioning led by Dean Ryan for the Environmental Science and Studies Department,” Henderson recalls.

“We developed the idea for an institute, first of all, for all faculty and student research,” says Ryan. “It is meant to be a hub for water and environmental research, internships, community engagement and education, and for experiential learning. It is not an academic unit, although it certainly has an educational mission.

“Faculty and students will look at these water problems in an interdisciplinary way, because we are not going to solve them just on the science side or just on the policy side,” she explains. “Those things have to work together.”

Ryan admits that she’s picked up just enough environmental science at Stetson to be dangerous. “Remember, you’re talking to a Russian literature specialist,” she jokes.

Ryan grew up in rural upstate New York and learned to love the environment in her bucolic hometown of Poolville, a hamlet of about 125 people. Water became an early part of her environmental experience. “I was free to run around the hills and swim the lakes.”

Ryan remembers visiting her grandparents in their winter Florida home in New Smyrna Beach near the Stetson campus.

“I absolutely fell in love with it,” she recalls. “I had never really been to the ocean. I had never been on a beach like that.

“It was a transformative experience.”

Together, the underwriters and dreamers for the new institute — Sandra Stetson, Karen Ryan, Wendy Anderson and Clay Henderson — helped create Stetson’s new water institute and research center. With that type of teamwork, who knows the magic that can come from it?

Bill Noblitt is the former editor of Stetson magazine. This article first appeared in Stetson magazine’s Fall 2015 issue, which you can find online here.