DRIFTLESS - It was a beautiful summer day on Thursday, July 6, for a visit to Crawford County’s Pine Creek Watershed in Eastman Township. Last seen by this reporter following the catastrophic flash flooding event in June of 2021, no signs of the ravages of that flooding remained. The stream flowed clear and cold, bountiful plant growth was bursting with life, and swallows and dragonflies darted through the air.

Two Trout Unlimited summer interns, who were born and raised in Southwest Wisconsin, were there to conduct a bridge inventory as part of a project to survey stream crossings in Crawford and Richland counties. Those interns are Maggie Dremsa of rural Boscobel, and Willow Pingel of rural Kendall.

Dremsa said one of her professors at UW-Whitewater, where she will be a junior in the fall studying environmental science, had notified her of the opportunity for summer work. Pingel had found the job through an online search for jobs in their field of study – biology, which they studied at UW-Stevens Point.

Both agreed that the job had offered them the opportunity to learn more about invasive species, an area they had known little about prior to starting the job.

Purpose of study

According to Sara Strassman, Trout Unlimited Driftless Area Program Manager, the purpose of the project, in part funded by a Surface Water Grant from Wisconsin DNR, is to provide data for three important outcomes:

• identifying infrastructure that is vulnerable to failure, and could be redesigned to accommodate floods and fish

• evaluating habitat connectivity for streams containing trout populations to help prioritize fisheries management objectives, and

• generating necessary information to support proactive infrastructure management in rural areas.

“The connectivity of aquatic ecosystems is imperative to the viability and resiliency of aquatic organisms.  Aquatic connectivity can be interrupted by human infrastructure, such as roads,” Strassman explained.  “Roads crossing streams require a structure, such as a culvert or bridge, to allow water, sediments, and wood to pass underneath, but culverts have historically had limited capacity to pass these materials or fish/wildlife due to obstructions such as perched outlets, and inadequate flows or unnatural velocities.”

Strassman explained that this leads to floodplain and stream channel constriction.

“Crossings not only can inhibit aquatic connectivity, but they can create flood hazard risks when they are undersized relative to flood and debris flows,” Strassman said.  “Climate change exacerbates the consequences of this undersized infrastructure through increased frequency and severity of flooding, as well as greater restriction on fish communities needing to find refugia or move between stream areas to meet their basic needs.”

 As has become more and more common in the Driftless Region, increased failures of road-stream crossings create significant disruption to human communities, and introduce sediments into aquatic systems.  Similar to work completed in Monroe County in Trout Unlimited’s Culvert and Bridge Inventory, Trout Unlimited’s work across the Driftless Area is intended to help towns and counties prioritize work and explore additional funding opportunities.

Work plan

The crews of Trout Unlimited interns will complete surveys of Brook Trout Reserve Waters this year, and will make a good dent in Class 1 and Class 2 Trout Streams, but likely will not complete crossing surveys for all trout waters this season. 

“We prioritized work on the highest quality cold water streams and trout stronghold locations first, but our goal is to also assess cool water systems, which should cover a large portion of total stream miles per county,” Strassman explained. “If our funding continues, we'll want to complete any unfinished watersheds in the counties we’re working in this year, and move into other areas with an interest in partnering with us.”

Unlike Monroe County, where the survey work was undertaken by county government, the Trout Unlimited project will likely not include all crossings in the counties.

“The total of 'unsurveyed' structures would include crossings with only ephemeral or runoff flows, very large structures (those that can be visually deemed adequate without surveying), private structures lacking permissions to survey, ghost structures (where our maps indicate there is a crossing, but none exists), and ford crossings,” Strassman explained. “Crossings that aren't fully measured will still be identified using this nomenclature.”  

Strassman explained that with limited funding, they need to ensure that they capture trout waters first because they represent a critical data gap preventing Driftless-Region-Scale conservation analysis. She said that in designing their survey, they also spoke with counties to collect information about areas with flood/hazard issues, and are hoping to capture most of those this year as well.

  Strassman said they have heard from at least one other Wisconsin county, and from northeast Iowa, about interest in the crossing survey work. This year, they also have deployed a crew of two in Trempealeau and Jackson counties.

Survey collaboration

According to Pingel, the two interns surveying Crawford and Richland counties began their jobs in early June with a week of training in Black River Falls.

Training was provided by Dan Dauwalter, Trout Unlimited’s Fisheries Science Director, and Chris Collier of Trout Unlimited’s State Council. Dauwalter is leading a similar survey project in northern Wisconsin in partnership with U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services.

Chris Collier is one of the main contacts for training on the Great Lakes Road Stream Crossing Protocol that is being used in the survey work. As with Monroe County Climate Change Task Force’s survey data, the Crawford, Richland, Trempealeau and Jackson county data will be housed in the Great Lakes Road Stream Crossing Inventory database, developed by Michigan DNR.

“Bobbi Jo Fisher, WDNR Environmental Analysis Supervisor, who had trained interns in survey work in Monroe County, offered to help us with training, but the timing didn’t work out,” Strassman said. “However, WDNR’s aquatic invasive species experts have been our first point of contact for reports from the field, and their natural heritage, fisheries and environmental analysis sections were involved in our data collection design.” 

In addition, Strassman explained that Trout Unlimited will also work with WDNR on some of the data analysis and distribution back to local governments.

Dauwalter and Collier trained this year’s interns on taking the measurements for the survey. Those measurements include:

• slopes and heights of banks and approaches to the crossing

• alignment of channel with bridge/culvert opening

• sizing of crossing relative to flood flows

• channel dimensions, slope and streambed properties

• stream velocity

“We are planning to disseminate the data from this summer’s work through several presentations as well as through the reporting tools available at the Great Lakes Stream Crossing Dashboard,” Strassman said. “We haven't set meeting dates yet, but we're expecting to conduct them at the end of the summer or in the fall.” 

That database can be found online at:

https://midnr.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/d7f355deda9a4bfe85df268785c0cd7b

Work to date

Dremsa and Pingel said that they expected to complete their work in Crawford County last week, and would be moving on to streams in Richland County this week. So far, they have surveyed multiple watersheds in Crawford County, including Knapp’s Creek, Gran Grae Creek and Richland Creek.

“We attempted to survey creeks in the Prairie du Chien area, but had mixed results due to the drought conditions,” Dremsa said. “What we were getting were dry, non-typical, values.”

Their work in Richland County will focus mostly on trout streams in the southern part of the county. The two will continue their work until about the end of August.

When asked what they perceive as the value of the work they’re doing, Pingel had this to say:

“Knowing that the data we’re collecting will be useful in trout habitat restoration efforts is inspiring to me,” Pingel said. “I believe that our efforts will provide highway departments, town road crews, and natural resource professionals with the information they need to make good decisions about stream crossing projects.”

Maggie Dremsa agreed with Pingel, and added that she also enjoys the job because it allows her to be out in nature.

Pingel recently graduated from UW-Stevens Point with a degree in fish biology.

“I’d love to find work in that field, and in addition I am also interested in paleobiology,” Pingel said. “I’m actually thinking of going back to school for a masters degree.”

Dremsa will be a junior next year at UW-Whitewater, and says that in her studies, she has an emphasis on geology and geography, and technique chemistry.