Friday’s NAS Seminar: Illinois researcher (and UWGB grad) talks rivers


The Natural and Applied Sciences seminar series resumes this Friday (Nov. 6) with the presentation “Often too much but sometimes too little: Phosphorus and dissolved oxygen in Illinois streams and rivers.” Featured speaker Mike Machesky will begin his talk at 3:30 p.m. in Room 301 of the Environmental Sciences Building. Machesky is a 1976 UW-Green Bay graduate in Science and Environmental Change who went on to earn his UW-Madison Ph.D. in water chemistry. He has spent most of his career with the Illinois State Water Survey, an applied research unit of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Machesky will describe his team’s effort to continuously monitor dissolved oxygen at over 500 wadeable stream sites throughout Illinois — a modeling study that confirmed the factors responsible for a massive fish kill along the Rock River below Rockford in June 2009. He will also discuss the difficulty of tracking and isolating phosphorous-related impacts. The 3:30 p.m. talk is free and open to the public, as is the preceding 3 p.m. reception with Machesky in ES 317.