Septic tanks, wells, stormwater drains, wastewater plants — the stuff that quietly keeps Minnesota's water usable is exactly the stuff nobody notices until it fails. That's the pitch behind the University of Minnesota's Water Resources Center, one of 54 federally authorized water research institutes nationwide, which spends its days bridging campus research with the thousands of engineers, city staff and landowners who actually run the state's water systems.
The center, part of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences and University of Minnesota Extension, is led by director Bonnie Keeler, who earned her master's in 2007 and her PhD in 2013 at the university. "Invisible water infrastructure: septic systems, wells, stormwater drains, wastewater treatment ... all of that is what keeps us going," Keeler said, per the university.
About 1.2 million Minnesotans — roughly 20% of the state — get their drinking water from private wells, and the center's Private Well Education Program, run with the Minnesota Department of Health, has held testing clinics in Clay and Crow Wing counties to help homeowners check their own water. On the urban side, its Clean Sweep program helps cities fine-tune street sweeping to cut pollution before it ever reaches a storm drain, and researchers are testing whether fungus can filter phosphorus and sediment out of stormwater runoff.
Some of that work runs through the university's St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, a fluid-mechanics facility on Hennepin Island where researchers can test water flow and filtration under controlled conditions.
The center also maintains the County Geologic Atlas Series, detailed aquifer maps built with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources that now cover 81 of the state's 87 counties — the kind of groundwater data cities and well drillers rely on but rarely see credited. Graduate students are pushing into newer territory too: PhD candidate Anu Li is studying how Chronic Wasting Disease spreads through water systems, while master's graduate Amelia Olsen has researched manoomin, or wild rice, one of Minnesota's signature aquatic plants. Their work is backed in part by the center's Watershed Innovations Grant, which funds student water research.
The demand for that expertise is showing up in the numbers. More than 4,600 Minnesota stormwater professionals went through WRC training last year, and university surveys cited by the center found 93% of Minnesotans are concerned about lake and river pollution, 97% say the state's lakes and rivers matter to their quality of life, and 85% believe scientific research can actually solve the state's water problems. The center will put some of that research in front of the people who use it at the Minnesota Water Resources Conference, set for October 13-14.