If you’re going to study nature, it makes sense that you would be in nature.

…no one else in the world has this sort of facility.

John Gaffney is one of the University of Minnesota graduate students working at the St. Anthony Falls Outdoor Stream Lab …a one-of-a-kind facility for environmental research.

The Mississippi River water flows through this facility. It comes in from the upper pool above St. Anthony Falls, flows through our stream here, and then is discharged back into the Mississippi.

The Outdoor StreamLab is the best of both worlds. This human-made stream gives researchers control over things like sediment levels and flow rates …something a wild river setting wouldn’t provide. But having the lab outdoors is important, because indoor labs don’t give researchers like Anne Lightbody the sunlight, weather conditions, plants, animals and enormous size needed to create those life-like conditions.

We have over 500 organisms per square foot of the bed here. These are little bugs that are found within every stream and lake within Minnesota.

Along with providing a closer look at tiny creatures, the Outdoor StreamLab will help students and researchers study river-related issues like flood control and groundwater contamination.

This lab is also great for students, because of the professional-like setting it creates, giving them the opportunity to work with different people, from different disciplines, with different sets of knowledge.

Some of us would like to drain the channel to take certain measurements, but the ecologists wouldn’t like that… so we all had to make compromises in order to get the work done.

This river within a river is drawing some of the best researchers in the world to the Twin Cities.

We also have projects, already in the works, with other countries, that will utilize the facility to tackle stream-restoration problems in their countries.

In addition to being a unique facility and great resource for the world’s best water experts, St. Anthony Falls Lab director Fotis Sotiropoulos, says the Outdoor StreamLab will also be clearly visible and on display to the public …located across the river from downtown Minneapolis and adjacent to the recently-opened, water-power park on Hennepin Island.

We cannot do this in the natural world, for obvious reasons, but we can easily do this here. And that’s why this facility is unique; it provides us the opportunity for some unique research.

For the University of Minnesota, I’m Justin Ware.