What did we conclude from our findings?
Conclusions
From the project results, the team concluded that the VNPA has a strong volunteer base, online presence, and public perception; however, they are limited by their budget and funding sources, relationship with government, physical resources, and the number of team members required to effectively utilize their volunteer base. To address the lack of statistics surrounding water levels, the VNPA can utilize volunteers and park visitors to monitor biodiversity and water levels in Văcărești Nature Park (VNP). The team concluded that while the VNPA members have speculated about the hydrology and geology underneath the park, they do not know all of the details for certain; therefore, the organization needs to perform a hydrogeological study of the park. In addition, the VNPA needs to conduct a topographical study of the park to maximize the effectiveness of their current pilot and future rain gardens and stop water pooling on their trails. These conclusions led the team to write the following set of four short-term and three long-term recommendations.
Recommendations
The conclusions led the team to write the following set of short-term and long-term recommendations.
The VNPA can implement short-term recommendations within weeks or months through volunteers and park visitor efforts. Long term solutions are significantly more involved than short-term, and consequently will require government approval, funding from park sponsors, and outside contractors to execute. These solutions are on the order of months to years and may not involve volunteers, however these solutions are necessary before the VNPA implements any large-scale water management projects. Additionally, these projects could involve Civil Engineering MQP students from WPI who could work alongside the contractors.
Short Term Recommendations
Crowd-Sourced Monitoring Data
The team recommends that the VNPA utilize their mobile park application infrastructure to involve volunteers and park visitors in crowdsourced monitoring data of reed areas and water levels. The VNPA should install a stand with an informational panel detailing information on reeds and their role in the VNP’s water problem. The user would scan a QR code that opens the VNPA’s park visit app and then place their phone in a frame such that everyone takes a picture at the same angle
The app would send these pictures to the VNPA and they could then evaluate reed expansion over the course of weeks or months to determine whether or not they need to clear vegetation. Photographs of the reed area from the same angle would allow the VNPA to easily discern how much the reeds are expanding by visual inspection, but they can also use software packages to quantify the expansion. Volunteers could also help the VNPA analyze data by editing the submitted pictures such that they are a uniform size, further simplifying visual inspection. The same principle of using the VNPA app to monitor vegetation areas applies to water monitoring as well. The VNPA can have volunteers or visitors take a picture of water monitoring gauges in their lakes or monitoring well gauges and send them to the organization for review. Volunteers could help analyze water monitoring data by entering it into a spreadsheet for the VNPA, and the time lapse can show the public abstract problems like reed takeover with a series of images.
Crowdsourcing data takes pressure off the VNPA members to conduct reed and water level monitoring on their own, allowing them to focus on other projects in the park. This benefits the organization given that time constraints have been a limiting factor for the VNPA’s plans for park projects and improvements thus far. Additionally, this technique increases the VNPA’s ability to collect data from multiple areas in the VNP in a shorter amount of time. Because this solution also involves park users, it has the potential to improve their relationship with the VNPA because they will be actively engaged in sharing and monitoring the park’s health. The crowdsourcing endeavor is also an opportunity for the VNPA to engage with their volunteers in data analysis and offers a different method of utilizing the volunteers’ expertise, since many of them workday jobs and they may be able to use their skills from their job for the VNPA.
Vegetation Clearing
The team recommends the VNPA utilize their volunteers to cut reed areas once the VNPA decides that intervention is required. Because the VNPA relies on volunteers to execute projects in a cost-effective manner, the VNPA should explore using a combination of mowing and vegetation shading. First, the VNPA can clear the land with mowing techniques with hand tools, and then, the volunteers can plant ground cover. The only costs are the basic hand tools like hedge clippers and the plants used for shading. Additionally, subsequent clearings of the reeds would be less intensive because the shading would decrease reed germination. The team also recommends using solarization on the severed stems of the reeds to kill the rhizome mat before planting native ground cover.
The team does not recommend herbicides because the VNP is a very confined “perched” wetland. The herbicides may target rarer plants, and these chemicals may linger indefinitely in the clay layers further impacting vegetation growth. Especially without knowledge of the hydrological layers, herbicides could have long lasting negative impacts.
While solutions like digging are more effective in the long term, they require mechanization, which means that the VNPA would not be able to use volunteers to execute these projects without a significant training program.
Online Nature-Based Solutions Promotion
The VNPA indicated that the concept of a nature-based solution is new to Romania, and in a meeting with the collaborators, the team learned that there is no phrase for nature-based solutions in Romanian. The team recommends that the VNPA continue their work in promoting nature-based solutions and using their volunteers to disseminate information and education about nature-based solutions. Since volunteers are already involved in the organization’s online presence, they can add nature-based solutions to their current efforts. The VNPA can add information panels near their pilot rain gardens in the south side of the park and include the QR code monitoring.
Monitoring Wells
Since the monitoring wells are so shallow, the team recommends that they install these around the entire park. Collecting data from these wells will start to construct a hydrological picture of the VNP, which is necessary for large-scale water projects. Volunteers can be involved in this solution by helping to dig the wells, although the survey results show that only 51% of volunteers are currently interested in digging, so it may a better use of the volunteer resource to monitor the wells. The organization can use crowdsourcing in this monitoring process similar to the time lapse recommendation, and the VNPA can put instruction panels on the side of the wells for volunteers to routinely check.
Long Term Recommendations
Topographical Study
Since the VNPA is interested in using rain gardens to direct storm water and already has a pilot project in the park, the team recommends that the VNPA conduct a topographical study of the VNP to identify the high and low points in the park. The results from this study will aid the VNPA in deciding where to implement more rain gardens in the park. This could be funneling water out of any low point in the park to the lowest point in the park or directing runoff from a local high point to a specific low point.
Hydrogeological Study
The team recommends that the VNPA perform a hydrogeological study of the park since there is no definitive data detailing the hydrology and geology of the VNP. The VNPA expressed interest in digging wells in the park to bring in groundwater; however, if the VNP is an aquiclude, then digging a well might have the opposite effect: the well could drain the park’s surface water instead of bringing groundwater up into the park’s ponds. The hydrogeological study will confirm or reject the idea that the VNP is a perched wetland and inform the VNPA as to whether or not a well will be an effective water management solution. Monitoring the hydrology of the park is a matter of digging and sealing pilot monitoring wells and monitoring them over the period of “at least a year, preferably two or three" (Scweisberg, 2021). The hydrological aspect of the proposed study could involve volunteers with the QR code info panels described in Section 5.2.1. The results from this study will uncover the hydrology of the park and provide the VNPA or future research groups with the information needed to research and decide upon the most effective long-term water management solutions.
Pond Expansion
The team’s final long-term recommendation for the VNPA is to make pond shorelines steeper and deepen the park’s ponds to limit reed expansion. Steeper shorelines decrease the habitable space for the reeds and combats their expansion. Volunteers cannot execute this solution since they do not have the skills to operate an excavator. This solution brings significant administrative, financial, and logistical limitations. Similar to the other long-term solutions, the VNPA would need government approval and funding, but they would also need to organize the logistics of bringing an excavator into the park and a location to put the excess dirt in order to minimize the damage to VăcăreÈ™ti’s fragile ecosystem.
Future Works
While the team provided the VNPA with a set of recommendations on water management, they were mostly of the nature of monitoring and identifying areas for intervention. This allowed the team to identify areas of future work, projects that future IQP groups can investigate and implement.
