Nakano’s Legacy

Twenty years ago now, in 1995, Shigeru Nakano embarked on research that would change the way scientists who study streams and rivers think about these ecosystems. Nakano used the bold approach of covering a small stream in Hokkaido, northern Japan, with mosquito netting stretched over a greenhouse frame to cut off the insects falling into the stream from the streamside (riparian) forest. It also stopped the flow of adult aquatic insects that were emerging from the stream from entering the forest. As I describe in For the Love of Rivers, the results were astounding. Nakano and his colleagues, and later other scientists in other regions, found that about half or more of the animals in the forest that depend on insects emerging from streams, like bats, birds, lizards, and spiders, disappeared when a critical part of their food supply was cut off. Likewise, when forest insects no longer fell into the stream, half the fish left.

Shigeru Nakano drowned in a tragic boat accident in Baja California in March 2000, while visiting field sites of another ecologist who was studying flows of insects to desert islands created by the rich sea wrack that washes up on beaches from the Sea of Cortez. I will never forget when I heard the news, and the trying weeks afterwards as the US Coast Guard and Mexican Navy searched for him without success. Many of our lives were forever changed by his loss, but our understanding of streams and their importance to landscapes and humans was also forever changed, and this brings me joy despite the loss.

Nakano’s work inspired many other river and stream ecologists to look more closely and delve more deeply into the unintended consequences of our human activities on streams and their riparian forests. Nearly every action we take in forests and grasslands, such as grazing cattle, cutting trees, mining metals, and spraying chemicals to kill insects or weeds can affect the flow of terrestrial insects that fall into streams and feed the fish. At the same time, nearly every action we take in streams, such as diverting water or straightening streams into ditches to speed flood waters away, can harm the immature invertebrates living on the stream bed and ultimately reduce the total amount of adult insects that emerge from the water surface and feed the animals that live along streams.

Every year the scientists who study streams gather at professional meetings to present their work to each other, meetings held by societies like the Society for Freshwater Science and the American Fisheries Society. This year, each of these meetings had whole sessions with titles like “Land-Water Interfaces” and “Cross-Ecosystem Resource Subsidies: From Land to Water and Back Again”. Scientists are working actively to understand, for example, how pollution and channelization of streams in urban areas affects these “subsidies” of insects that emerge from streams to riparian forests. Others want to know how wildfire in natural watersheds affects the flux of insects in both directions. It is clear that Nakano’s ideas, along with those of other scientists like Dr. Mary Power and her colleagues at UC Berkeley who came up with very similar conclusions at the same time, have continued to inspire a new generation of scientists to study the real importance of these stream-forest connections.

In the past few weeks, I have been corresponding with Dr. Yoshi Taniguchi, one of Nakano’s former students, about translating the title of For the Love of Rivers into Japanese. This is not easy, given the multiple meanings of this phrase in English. I also wrote him about how proud Shigeru Nakano would have been to see so many of his former students become accomplished scientists and continue to study how connected streams are to their surrounding landscapes. In return, I know that many of them still think and dream about Nakano, and gather strength and inspiration for continuing their work.

In the Drift

 We thank long-time SFS member and Colorado State University professor Kurt Fausch for taking time out to catch us up on his brand new book, ‘For the Love of Rivers’.  What appears to have happened here is that Kurt took a sabbatical leave from his post at Colorado State, spent several months in Writers’ Residencies at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, both in Oregon, and came out on the other side with a book. As you might glean from its title, For the Love of Rivers is not just about the ecology of streams. In the words of OSU Press, it also ‘celebrates their beauty and mystery’. We are lucky to have caught up with Kurt to ask him some probing questions about this mystery...  (This blog was first published in the Society for Freshwater Science “In the Drift” newsletter, May 2015).
http://www.freshwater-science.org/Publications/Newsletter-In-The-Drift/ITD--Spring-2015.cfm#book

Streams of Consciousness

Books represent large undertakings. The writing process is arduous, the time lengthy, and the research often difficult, even dangerous. So what leads authors to pour their hearts and souls into such laborious work? Author Kurt Fausch joins us today to share what drove him to create his recently published book, For the Love of Rivers. Staying true to his scientific background, yet venturing into the connection between nature and emotion, Fausch offers his audience a book that reads much like a journey—and today, he invites us to come along.

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Why would a scientist write about love for rivers? Don’t scientists normally stick to the facts?

I became a fish biologist, and later a professor of stream ecology, so that I could do the studies needed to provide answers for the field biologists and natural resource stewards who manage fish and the streams and rivers they inhabit. Along with teaching students about these ideas, and working together with graduate students and other researchers on these studies, this is really all I ever wanted to achieve.

Somehow, along the way, I became drawn into a deeper relationship with the streams and rivers I was studying, the colleagues I was working with, and the need to communicate both the science and these emotions to others.

 

In For the Love of Rivers: a Scientist’s Journey, I draw the reader into an international research collaboration with Japanese stream ecologist Shigeru Nakano and his colleagues.

http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/blog/streams-of-consciousness

Where Rivers Run in the Human Heart: a stream ecologist tells the story of his watery journey

It was the weekly Monday morning Stream Team seminar in the OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Room 32 in Nash Hall was packed. At the front stood guest speaker Kurt Fausch, looking the part of a lifelong field researcher, his casual, earth-toned clothes hanging loose and comfortable on his long, lanky frame. But he was about to reveal his alter ego as a philosopher of wild waters…. (First published on the Oregon State University blog “Terra: the power of research”, February 17, 2015)
http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2015/02/where-rivers-run-in-the-human-heart/

Scientists and Artists in Residency Together

So, a Scientist, an Artist, and a Writer Walk into a Forest... On a recent trip to the Cascade Head Experimental Forest, residents from the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology stood around a clump of moss, taking pictures, oohing and ahhing over its intricate details, pinching off pieces to study later, maybe to use in a drawing or a painting. The scientists in attendance, forest and stream ecologists, seemed less fascinated. They'd certainly seen plenty of moss up close before. But they watched the excited artists, interested in what they saw, how the artists looked at this thing that was so familiar to them. Later, the scientists tossed around terms as familiar to them as sibling names or state capitals. The artists interrupted, asked for definitions, explanations, scribbled the new information down for later use. It was a normal day at the Sitka Center, where artists and scientists live, learn and create together…. (First published on the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology website “Artist and Environmental Scientist Program”, Fall 2011.)

http://www.sitkacenter.org/3-1-1.html