91ÇÑ×Ó

It definitely suits Sue Niezgoda, a civil engineer who had a stint at the highly regarded Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana where she met fellow engineering professor, the late Pat Ferro. After he moved to 91ÇÑ×Ó and encouraged her to do the same, she joined him in the 91ÇÑ×Ó School of Engineering and Applied Science.

For 10 of her 15 years here, Niezgoda has partnered with – a local nonprofit that protects and revitalizes Inland Northwest forests, water and wildlife – in stream restoration work.

The Lands Council, for its part in stream restoration, previously used live beavers to guide small tributaries where they were most needed to return a waterway to freedom. But that meant securing beavers and taking care of them before setting them loose in a new territory. Watching the beavers up close and working alongside them to learn from their ways was gratifying, but determining how to replicate their work without an impact on the animals themselves was even better.

Enter beaver dam analogs (BDAs) to save the day.

The Best-Ever Research

“Oh, I want to do that,” was Niezgoda’s response when she first heard of BDAs during a conference about river restoration. “I knew it would be a great opportunity for my undergraduate students in civil engineering to get their feet wet in river restoration work.”

She returned to her stream restoration class, excited to share what she’d learned. In a moment of kismet, one of her students, Emily Zikmund, had worked for The Lands Council as a summer intern and learned about its work with BDAs and connected Niezgoda with the agency.

What ensued and grew over the next decade became what Niezgoda says has been the “best-ever” research project. “What I love is the undergrad focus and the practical applied design experience they’re gaining in an area of water resources engineering that usually isn’t experienced until graduate school. These projects are low-risk and low-cost, but still require a lot of field work and data analysis.”

Over the years, her teams have worked on several sites in Spokane County. The first three – California, Rattlers Run and Spangle Creeks – were south of the city in rural areas bordering Palouse country; the current site is Thompson Creek, which empties into Newman Lake, northeast of Spokane.

Regardless of the location, the students’ work is done in much the same way. First, the students complete a watershed assessment to understand the inputs of water, sediment and nutrients coming into a project reach. Second, the students spend five days in the field conducting labs to collect data related to evaluating how well the river is connected to its floodplain, the energy and power of the flowing water to erode or deposit sediment, the health of the vegetation along the streambanks, and the water quality through an analysis of the macroinvertebrates present in the reach. Lastly, the students use the results of these watershed and reach-scale processes to develop a design using BDAs that can lead to significant improvements in the quality, health and stability of the degraded river reach.

“We want rivers to flood! When the water in the river rises enough to break out into the floodplain it acts like a relief valve, to allow stream energy to dissipate and sediment and phosphorus to fall out and deposit within the reach rather than it being transported by the flow to downstream water bodies – which is what’s happening in Thompson Creek and Newman Lake,” Niezgoda explains.

In this BDA project, a key element to observe is phosphorus. It’s a naturally occurring mineral that becomes dangerous when in excess, which usually is due to the use of agricultural fertilizers, or, in this case, the runoff caused by logging and off-road vehicle use in the watershed forests, “kicking up all that sediment that has phosphorus attached to it,” Niezgoda says. Runoff carries that sediment/phosphorus into Thompson Creek, which has been modified by past land use practices to act like a superhighway, and transports it down into Newman Lake. The high levels of phosphorus accelerate algae blooms, reduce oxygen, kill fish and destroy the aquatic ecosystem. At places like Newman Lake, where residents have waterfront yards, family pets that enjoy a splash in the lake fall victim to its dangers.

The work 91ÇÑ×Ó students are doing to design and install four different types of dams – following the examples set by beavers that typically build a primary structure and then two or three secondary structures downstream – is helping to mitigate those concerns.

Josh Braun (’25) heard Niezgoda speak about this project during his freshman engineering seminar and it cemented his plan for BDA work to be his top choice for a senior design project.

“Something that piqued my interest was the theory behind the BDAs,” Braun says. “Not only were they low-tech process-based structures – meaning they rely on natural deposition and erosion to alter the stream (as opposed to going in with large machinery) – they use materials that beavers would use and will decompose eventually.”

Senior Isabella Camarota (’26), of Holland, Michigan, says she chose civil engineering due to questions around how developers might reduce damage caused to the environment in construction. As for the BDA project, Camarota says its scale was “small enough that the end goal could be grasped and the effects of decisions could be seen,” while also showing how the concepts could benefit the environment on a larger scale.

“The project showed that adaptability and perseverance are key when working in the environment,” Camarota says. It also has opened her up to the many opportunities within water resources engineering as she begins her career.

Grants, Permits and Partners

Niezgoda’s students are learning about the non-design tasks required of these types of projects, too. For one, obtaining permits can be a hurdle, and each permitting agency can have different processes. There are sometimes state or federal rulings about the type of work that can be done in wetlands and rivers, and opportunities or challenges can arise in the Spokane area specifically due to being on an aquifer. Just last year, students learned how The Lands Council and Niezgoda navigated all of those permits successfully with Washington Department of Ecology, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Spokane County.

They also learn how this kind of work is paid for, and how critical partnerships are made to connect with funding resources. In the case of BDAs, The Lands Council writes grant applications to the Department of Ecology to secure funds – something the University wouldn’t be eligible to do as the grants are mostly available to environmental nonprofits.

It’s a win-win arrangement. The Lands Council fosters the relationships with landowners and permitting agencies, secures and delivers materials for building the structures, and works alongside students in their waders, too.

Watershed Restoration Program Director Kat Hall is an environmental educator at her roots and thrives on getting her hands dirty alongside students and complementing what they’ve gained from Niezgoda in the classroom. At home in a pair of waders and boots, she enthusiastically talks about the sinuosity of the channel, the wood they’ve selected for posts, and how to weave young pine boughs in and out of the posts from one bank to the other.

“Think of the channel spanners as speed bumps,” Hall says. “They don’t need to store water behind them, we just need them to slow the flow.”

She can point to all the dams and tell which years they went in and what they’ve accomplished. She’s especially proud of the new “s” curves in what used to be a straight path for Thompson Creek.

Hall sees those regularly from the ground as she brings crews of volunteers to plant patches of willows, mountain alders, and a host of other native trees and shrubs to nourish the creek. Niezgoda brings a drone to get a bird’s-eye view of the subtly changing landscape each year.

Together, they’ve inspired a generation of hopeful water restoration workers. Something all of us benefit from in one way or another.

Working Wonders

Niezgoda – like so many of her students – chose this field because of an innate appreciation for and enjoyment of being outdoors. But she’s quick to acknowledge that civil engineers alone won’t fix the waterways that have been damaged or degraded.

“It involves so many disciplines – ecologists, geomorphologists, engineers, landscape architects,” she says. She jokes that the macroinvertebrates that engineering students collect are generically referenced as “bugs” until Betsy Bancroft’s biology students come along and give them proper identities. She also leans on Madeleine Matthews and Dave Cleary from chemistry, who provide greater understanding of changing phosphorus concentrations in the creek.

“Dr. Sue’s work has introduced many future engineers at 91ÇÑ×Ó to the somewhat niche world of stream restoration, specifically through BDAs,” Braun says. “Because of her work, many civil engineers choose water resources as their focus because they can see the same fascinating potential in the field that Dr. Sue can see in stream restoration.”

That was certainly true for Braun, who chose civil engineering and the water resources concentration. He’s currently putting that to good use during a five-month internship in Senegal with Engineering Ministries International.

As students finish their work at 91ÇÑ×Ó and move into their chosen fields, Sue Niezgoda and Kat Hall keep their eye on the movement of water in local creeks.

And somewhere nearby, the actual beavers who invented the work are proud of what they inspired . . . and are patiently waiting to move in and take over.

^{Note: author Kate Vanskike is currently president of the board of The Lands Council}