Land arrangement alters water quality
By Michael Frett | Jan. 20, 2016The Yahara Watershed reaches around the city of Madison and its defining lakes. It’s a large stretch of land, spanning farms and forests and dotted by the occasional construction site that slowly reshapes and urbanizes its traditional farms and prairies. In the center are five lakes, each one fed by the rain that flows down the periphery of the watershed and into the Yahara River, ultimately leading through the rivers and streams that join the Mississippi and drain into the Gulf of Mexico almost a thousand miles away. In a Birge Hall lab seemingly isolated from that network of water that flows around it, Jiangxiao Qiu studied models of the region, observing data sets created from Department of Natural Resources mapping, UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology and other organizations.