You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure:
Lessons from Iowa’s Waterways
by Mary Skopec
The author (far right) with IOWATER volunteers.
Viewed from space, Earth appears as a blue marble with swooshes of white left by some long-forgotten painter. The amount of blue is overwhelming and a bit surreal. Earth, often called the “water planet,” is unique in many ways, with about 70 percent of its surface covered by water.
Even more spectacular is that water exists on Earth in three states of matter: liquid, vapor, and solid. In each phase, the forces of water shape our planet—scouring, lifting, moving, and depositing—in a constant cycle of motion and change. The power of water is what first piqued my interest in the natural sciences.
During my high school years in Cedar Rapids, I was a member of the cross country team. Our home meets were held at Noelridge Park, where we would loop around the park just long enough to cover two miles. When you are not an especially fast runner, you have lots of time to notice things. What I noticed over my four years as a competitor is that the little swale—nothing more than a shallow depression in the park, one I could easily step over—became a deeply incised stream by my senior year. Oof! I jumped down to the bottom of the new creek… and UGH, I scrambled back up and out. I was not thrilled with this new obstacle and had no idea how it had suddenly shown up in my way. I did not know then that the upstream development along Collins Road was wreaking havoc on my park.
When I trundled off to college, first at the University of Northern Iowa and then the University of Iowa, I became interested in a new, interdisciplinary way of looking at the world. Rather than subdividing nature into chemistry, biology, and physics, the academic world was starting to think about how all these elements wove around one another and influenced each other, pulling in economics, human behavior, and social dynamics. This type of thinking resonated with me.
The author with participants of the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat
photo by Larry Stone
I am a synthesizer. Despite my assurances to potential employers that I am detail‑oriented (lies we all tell in job interviews), I am actually not that great with details. My brain tends to pull concepts together into a tapestry that rests over the natural world.
By the time I finished my bachelor’s degree and a short stint studying fire movement in southern California for my master’s degree, I was back to thinking about water. In Iowa, water is inescapable. Precipitation, or lack thereof, dominates the news cycle. Creeks are the playgrounds for local children. Even our borders are defined by water—“the land between two rivers”—which is, of course, a misnomer; we are bounded by the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Big Sioux, and the Des Moines rivers.
One of the most formative events that happened to Iowa with respect to water was the flood of 1993. In a water‑rich state, floods are nothing new to Iowa. But the flood of 1993 was an eye‑opening and catastrophic event. Knocking Des Moines’ drinking water utility out of service, overtopping the Coralville Reservoir, and dividing Iowa City for months, the floodwaters crashed into our collective consciousness.
For me, it spun me back into thinking about water: about the pollutants that all that water had mobilized into our rivers and streams and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico. I wondered about the lasting impacts on rivers. I wondered how we would even know. My dissertation took that question and examined how we could efficiently monitor our river systems to optimize water data.
In a coincidence of good fortune, others were wondering the same things—and wondering why the State of Iowa was not doing more. A lawsuit brought against the State of Iowa and the Environmental Protection Agency demanded a more robust water‑monitoring and assessment program. Just as I was finishing my dissertation on optimizing water‑quality monitoring programs, the state appropriated one million dollars to build a new program. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was given the monumental task of creating it.
A small team was hired, including Lynette Seigley, Joost Korpel, Bernie Hoyer, and me. We drew stakeholders from government, nonprofit organizations, commodity groups, and academia. We prioritized what we thought was important—river quality—and what we thought was less important—beach monitoring—and set out to build a sustainable program of not only data, but information. Paul Johnson, the DNR director at the time, wanted to see Iowans involved in the stewardship of our water. IOWATER, the citizen‑volunteer monitoring program, had just started but was completely re‑envisioned to be an integral part of monitoring our waters, with ten percent of all state‑appropriated funds dedicated to supporting citizen scientists.
The program grew fast and not without a few bumps and bruises that are likely to accompany such a fast pace. In 1999, an article by the Des Moines Register called attention to the fact that monitoring of waters at Iowa’s beaches was nonexistent and was leaving the public vulnerable to sickness from recreational exposure to E. coli. Beach monitoring zoomed up the priority list.
In 2005, dead geese at Carter Lake brought harmful algal blooms into the spotlight. Overnight, we began regularly testing for blue‑green algae toxins. The IOWATER program grew fast—nearly 3,500 volunteers were trained by dedicated staff who spent countless nights and weekends crisscrossing the state, training concerned citizens in church basements, Pizza Ranches, and county conservation board shelters.
Looking back, I take away many important lessons. First, the public deeply cares about water quality. When we gathered around a creek to test the water, I saw people from across the political spectrum. I saw kids and grandmothers. I saw people who knew a lot about water quality and those who knew next to nothing. All of them walked away more engaged and excited to do something.
Which brings me to my second lesson: in the absence of information, assumption and generalized anxiety are in charge. In the early days of the monitoring program, someone who was mostly opposed to monitoring expressed concern about collecting data. My response to him was, “How will we know if we’ve made anything better?” That stopped him in his tracks. He was so conditioned to believe that all the news would be bad that he had never stopped to consider good news.
One of the original native stone buildings at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
In my role at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, I had the privilege of inheriting the CLAMP (Cooperative Lakes Area Monitoring Program) started by Jane Shuttleworth. Since 1999, CLAMP has tested the waters of the Iowa Great Lakes. Over 26 years of monitoring, the lakes' water quality has dramatically improved. Phosphorus levels have dropped by nearly half, and water clarity has doubled. The community investments in watershed protection have been highly successful. Without monitoring, we could not document any of it. An often‑used quote is “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
My last (probably not) lesson is that when working on Iowa’s water quality, we must think bigger and bolder. For decades, we have nibbled around the edges. We put a wetland in a watershed and, like the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, expect the wetland to perform miracles and hold back the entire watershed’s pollution.
The Iowa Great Lakes show us that long‑term and significant investment can be impactful. But we must scale up even bigger: try new ideas, and think about how all this integrates across agriculture, public health, economic policies, and demographics. Iowans want change and are ready to roll up their sleeves and make it happen. My outlook remains positive—I have never been disappointed by the Iowans standing around the creeks, marveling at the world below them.
Mary Skopec grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she spent summers hiding amongst the lilacs in her parents’ backyard, observing the natural world. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geography, followed by an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in environmental science, all from the University of Iowa. She began her career at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, starting as a temporary employee developing a water-quality database on pesticides in Iowa’s waters. In 1998, she joined the IDNR as a full-time employee in the GIS section and, in 1999, moved to the newly formed water quality monitoring program. During her 18 years in the water monitoring program, she coordinated the IOWATER citizen monitoring program, oversaw the creation of Project A.W.A.R.E. (a canoe-based river cleanup and educational event), and supervised the stream, lake, wetland, and groundwater monitoring programs. In 2016, she moved to Okoboji to start a new role as the Executive Director of Iowa Lakeside Laboratory Regents Resource Center. Lakeside’s mission of nature-based education provides a full-circle moment for Mary, and she loves nothing more than observing the lakes, the prairies, and the constant ebb and flow of life in the 147 acres. She is grateful to the generations of scientists who protected and nurtured this slice of heaven, and she is overjoyed to see the new, young faces discovering the secrets that nature unfolds to them.