Award-winning floating wetland possible remedy for blue-green algae Blooms
By Frank Carini /
ecoRI News staff
The structure holds nearly 20 native wetland plant species. (Alexandra Ionescu/Rhode Island Collective)
Floating in a circle around a pond in
Massachusetts is a mini-wetland built by six Rhode Islanders. Earlier this
summer, the mostly natural creation was chosen as the winning installation in
the seventh annual Art on the Trails outdoor art and poetry program.
But the freshwater wetland, built by a
group of Ocean State artists, designers, and a botanist, wasn’t commissioned to
win an award. It was designed to raise awareness about the importance of
wetlands and show how they work. Mission accomplished.
Art juror Sarah Alexander, who chose “Below
and Above: A Floating Wetland Supports Life” by the Rhode Island Collective as
the best installation, said,
“The amount of careful research and thoughtful response to the space, along
with the combined efforts of its dedicated creators, blew me away.”
In the seven years of Art on the Trails,
the Rhode Island-built floating wetland was the first entry to be more than
just aesthetically pleasing. The wetland has been floating in Ice Pond in
Southborough since June 11. It was created by sourcing native plants, and
experiments with natural cordage. It shows how pollutants could be sucked from
stressed waterbodies with a little help from human hands. A single anchor line
keeps the wetland floating in a 15-foot circle, and not all over the popular
skating pond.
Members of the Rhode Island Collective
include Holly Ewald (visual artist), Maxwell Fertik (interdisciplinary artist),
Alexandra Ionescu (ecological artist), Hope Leeson (botanist), and August
Lehrecke and Matthew Muller (co-founders of an inflatable architecture studio),
who led the project’s construction.
The members weren’t a roving gang of environmentalists who all knew each other prior to building an award-winning wetland. Ewald knew Ionescu and Leeson, who knew Fertik, who knew Muller and Lehrecke. They all brought different experiences and expertise that jelled well together.
“The floating wetland ecosystem creates a
habitat for the more-than-human world below and above the water line through
the growth of native macrophytes. Through the plants’ life cycles, they
regenerate the food web, amplifying the natural processes between sunlight,
water, and microorganisms,” according to the Collective.
A northern water snake sticks its head out of the Japanese
knotweed pontoon held together by stainless steel mesh.
(Alexandra Ionescu/Rhode Island Collective)
ecoRI News recently spoke, via Zoom, with
the Collective’s six members about the project. Their structure was built using
dried Japanese knotweed, broadleaf cattails, and bamboo for buoyancy, as
alternatives to petroleum-based materials such as plastic and foam typically
used to construct floating wetlands. A small amount of stainless steel wire
mesh and cable holds the craft together.
The knotweed used to create the floating
wetland was harvested in late winter as dry stems from Mashapaug Pond and Gano
Park in Providence. Fertik said repurposing invasive species for the project’s
pontoons removed some of their biomass from the environment and transformed the
nonnative plants into a vessel to improve water quality and promote
biodiversity. (The dead stalks weren’t capable of spreading their
invasiveness.)
“The group didn’t want to use any plastic
or synthetic materials. We wanted to use natural materials for buoyancy,”
Muller said. “But we also want it to be reliable and not to, like, fall apart.
And since this is, you know, our first time doing it, we decided to use the
stainless steel, which can be used repeatedly, like if the organic material
degrades and we need to take the pontoon out of the water, we can compost the
knotweed and then use the same stainless steel mesh to put fresh knotweed in.”
The craft is home to 18 native wetland plant
species: American bur-reed; bayonet rush; brown fruited rush; Canada rush;
common cattail; Alleghany monkey-flower; blue flag iris; boneset; cardinal
flower; flat-topped goldenrod; Joe-Pye weed; New York ironweed; northern water
horehound; pickerelweed; swamp milkweed; buttonbush; silky dogwood; and
steeplebush.
The floating wetland will remain in Ice Pond in Southborough, Mass., until Sept. 17. (Alexandra Ionescu/Rhode Island Collective)
Floating wetlands are artificial islands
that host human-made ecosystems. They are designed to attract native species
while helping to improve water quality. Suspended in water, the plant roots
provide a home for diverse communities of algae, bacteria, fungi, and
protozoans, known as periphyton. As the plants upcycle nutrients from the water
into their roots, stems, leaves, and flowers, the periphyton provide nutrient
uptake, filtration, oxygenation, and toxin removal.
Southern New England’s freshwater lakes and
ponds, especially the shallow ones, are being stressed by development,
wastewater overflows, old and failing septic systems, antiquated cesspools, and
stormwater runoff carrying nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous from
fertilizers and roadway pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
By harnessing the natural ability of plants
and microbes to absorb nutrients and break down contaminants, natural wetlands
— and those created by concerned activists — help protect the region’s many
waterbodies.
The members of the Collective said floating
wetland ecosystems, like the ones created by nature, “heal water by
regenerating the food web. The genesis of an ecosystem begins with
microorganisms. We are learning how to initiate a propensity for nutrient
cycling and learning how to create the conditions for a collaboration with the
more-than-human world.”
The Collective’s 48-page PowerPoint presentation noted
Indigenous communities built floating islands for hundreds of years by
harvesting natural materials found in their surroundings. “By incorporating
native plants from freshwater marsh and pond ecosystems, we are supporting a
variety of other life forms,” they said.
Ice Pond, part of the 58.5-acre Elaine and Philip Beals Preserve, is a healthy ecosystem in
little need of a floating wetland to pull pollutants out of the water, but it
did give the Collective an opportunity to learn how floating wetlands create a
habitat, observe the decay of the natural materials used to build the craft,
and document the growth of the native wetland plants.
The Collective’s floating wetland will
remain on the Southborough pond until Sept. 17. The Providence Stormwater Innovation Center has
requested the craft’s presence for the ponds at Roger Williams Park.
The Collective hasn’t yet discussed the
project’s future after Ice Pond, but the members would like to create a
community project, perhaps in Roger Williams Park, where they could teach
people how to make and use them. Floating wetlands could also help lessen the
number of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) blooms that plagued many ponds and
lakes in southern New England.
Art on the Trails is
an annual site-specific ecological sculpture park exhibition.
To watch a video about the project, click here. To watch a beautiful
charcoal-drawing, time-lapse video, drawn by Ewald, that inspired the
project, click here.