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UI President Mary Sue Coleman; Lynn Sasmazer, program officer for
the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust; Jeffrey Vonk, Iowa DNR director; and
others are scheduled to speak at the 3:30 p.m. MRERS groundbreaking.
MRERS can be reached by taking Highway 22 about seven miles east of
Muscatine to Fairport and following the black-and-gold signs to MRERS.
Call 319-330-8714 on May 10, if additional help with directions is
needed.
Release: Immediate
Monday, May 7, 2001
May 10 Groundbreaking scheduled on banks of Mississippi River for
world's most comprehensive river research station
IOWA CITY, Iowa -- The Mississippi River, the nation's most storied
waterway, will move one step closer to becoming the world's most studied
river at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, May 10.
That's when the University of Iowa's internationally renowned IIHR will break ground seven miles
east of Muscatine near the community of Fairport for the construction of
the Mississippi Riverside Environmental Research Station (MRERS),
designed to be the world's most comprehensive river research station.
Existing monitoring stations routinely study such selected variables as
flood levels, sedimentation, fish populations, aquatic plants, water
quality, flood effects, and the impact of industrialization. MRERS,
scheduled to open this winter, will be the only station of its kind to
look at virtually all aspects of the river, according to V.C. Patel,
IIHR director. "MRERS will bring together researchers and students
from different disciplines to work on problems that cannot be addressed
in the traditional way by engineers, biologists, and planners acting on
their own," he says.
The idea to build the station originated from IIHR Associate Director
Tatsuaki Nakato's 1995 five-week trip down the Mississippi on an 18-foot
jon boat to investigate riverbank erosion between St. Paul, Minn. and
Cairo, Ill.
"From early in the morning, to late at night, we worked on
the river. I thought, 'How little knowledge of the river we have.' I was
overwhelmed by nature's work," Nakato says. "Because there is
no way we can simulate the Mississippi River in the lab; we need a good
field observation site.
"The interaction between the lock and dam system and river bank
protection; how the lock and dam causes silting but also creates
wetlands; and why the fish population is declining -- those are some of
the things we will study. Eventually, we want to have everything
remotely sensed, but that technology is far in the future," he
says. "This will be a facility where scientists in different
fields, biologists, hydrologists and others, will be in the same boat
and the same building and can teach each other. This will also be a
great place for the education of elementary and high school
students."
Because it will take a holistic look at the Mississippi River, MRERS may
change the way other rivers are studied. Patel and Nakato say that is
only natural since MRERS, in some respects, is modeled after two
renowned organizations that take a holistic approach toward ocean
research: Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, Calif. and
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Mass. "In a
similar way, MRERS will stimulate multidisciplinary research to assess
the long-term impact of natural events and human activities on the river
ecosystem and evaluate alternative strategies to protect it," Patel
says.
Support for MRERS comes from a number of sources. The Roy J. Carver
Charitable Trust of Muscatine provided $1.2 million for construction of
the facility. Private gifts, including a classroom gift by Marie F.
Carter of Bettendorf in memory of her husband, UI alumnus Archie N.
Carter, and a gift to name a laboratory from Richard and Mary Jo Stanley
of Muscatine, are also helping drive the project. The 7,400-square-foot
building is being designed by Stanley Consultants, Inc. and will open in
the winter of 2001. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is
providing three acres of land to the University at no charge and with
considerable interest in the station because the DNR operates a fish
hatchery next door.
The Institute, a unit of the UI College of Engineering, is one of the
world's premier and oldest fluids research and engineering laboratories.
Students and visitors from around the world have come to IIHR to study
and conduct research and to carry acquired expertise back to their home
countries.
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