Science

BOQUET SCIENCE

Most of what we know about the Boquet River we owe to Dennis Kalma, Ph.D. (Yale University).

Dr. Kalma may be best known to the community as the director of the BRASS water-testing laboratory until it had to be closed. Or, perhaps, for his website that he graciously allows BRASS to access for the scientific information he posts there. But he is also, and especially, appreciated for the many scientific studies of the Boquet that he conducted for BRASS, some of which are listed below.

He investigated the status of native mussels and their habitat when we feared that the invasive zebra mussel might out-compete our native species.
He studied the “embeddedness” of our river’s substrate to see how difficult it might be for trout and salmon to propagate and thrive.
He examined riparian vegetation along the entire river corridor to see if there was sufficient vegetation to buffer the runoff from urban and agricultural areas.
He conducted geomorphic studies of the riverbed and bank profiles in areas where streambank stability was in question, where the river had begun to braid and in flood-prone sections.
He studied whether eroded stream banks were the cause of our river’s disproportionately high phosphorus load given the relatively few dairy farms we have in the watershed.
He helped with our identification and measurement of invasive plant species in the watershed, especially along the river and transportation corridors.
He conducted plant and hydrological studies of 40 of the Boquet’s wetlands and continues to monitor changes in 20 of the wetlands in a current trend analysis study of invasives in our wetlands.