Engineer aims to help better manage watercourses in Ontario
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Going with the flow isn't good enough. If we want clean drinking water and healthy aquatic ecosystems, says Prof. Andrea Bradford, Engineering, we'll need to better manage our water resources. Providing the necessary tools is the goal of her Guelph research, including a recently funded study of stream flow requirements meant to help protect and conserve stream resources in increasingly thirsty parts of southern Ontario.
How much water does a stream need to keep flowing? A stream needs enough water to maintain connections along the channel and with riparian areas, the structure of the physical habitat and water quality, says Bradford. Timing, duration and frequency of flows are also important to the ecosystem.
She came to Guelph in 2002 from a two-year posting as senior policy adviser in the Ontario Ministry of the Environment's (OME) water policy branch.
She aims to ensure that water management practices are based not just on drinking-water requirements a key concern post-Walkerton but also on the need to maintain ecosystems, such as the watershed encompassed locally by the Grand River Conservation Authority (GRCA).
Early this year, Bradford received a three-year $150,000 grant from the OME to develop tools and techniques for quantifying water needs of streams. She'll work mostly in the Grand River watershed, an area that stretches from Dufferin County to Port Maitland on Lake Erie. The GRCA manages water and other natural resources for 38 municipalities including Guelph covering about 925,000 people.
She'll help develop ways to estimate just how much flow is needed to prevent ecological mishaps while trying to accommodate the needs of water users in parts of southern Ontario that have seen low water levels in recent years. Bradford explains that it's important to quantify ecosystem water needs to identify and resolve potential conflicts with human needs through watershed management.
As part of the Urban Systems Environmental Design research group in the School of Engineering, she studies ideas for water reduction and reuse, stream restoration, storm-water management and other measures.
For Bradford, that work doesn't end on the U of G campus. At her family's corner lot in the Hanlon Creek watershed, she commissioned a landscape architecture student to design a rain garden. The plan still only in blueprint form in her Thornbrough Building office incorporates various measures, from choosing drought-tolerant plants to building the soil's water-storing properties to installing rainwater storage devices.
I'd like to do better at practising what I preach, says Bradford, who's interested in studying rainwater use and storage with her colleague Prof. Khosrow Farahbakhsh. I don't want to use more city water for irrigation outdoors, and I don't want storm water running off the property.
Three years ago, she led the development of a plan to improve water quality in Sturgeon Bay, located on the east shore of Georgian Bay at Pointe au Baril. Along with her two children Martin, 6, and Robyn, almost two she can still swim there, but thanks to increased phosphorus loading, the water is far less clear than she remembers from her own childhood visits to the family cottage, and they have to stay out during occasional massive algal blooms.
Bradford wrote a report on the problem and developed an information package for cottagers and the community, although she says little action has been taken so far beyond the efforts of a small volunteer group.
She and her graduate students are also using hydrological and hydraulic models to study stream flow at Wilmot Creek east of Toronto and the Speed and Eramosa rivers and their tributaries. In Guelph, one of her grad students has investigated flow rates and development occurring since the 1950s to assess approaches to managing water resources.
Guelph has historically relied almost entirely on groundwater, but Bradford says continued development will require the city to look at alternatives, ideally beyond the idea of piping water from Lake Erie (and returning treated waste water).
Earlier, she helped evaluate water policy and develop water provisions for the Oak Ridges Moraine conservation plan. For her PhD in civil engineering at Queen's University, she studied wetland hydrology and ecology in Minesing Swamp near Barrie.
