Aiming to transform
Ecologist leads projects to protect, preserve the Eel River
Ind. — Over the last eight years, the Eel River in northern Miami County has undergone a stunning transformation.
Four low-head dams have been removed, making the river safer than ever before for paddlers. Fish and other aquatic animals are thriving that haven’t lived in the stream in decades. The water quality has vastly improved, thanks to efforts to curb the amount of nutrient runoff from farm fields.
And behind all those changes is Jerry Sweeten, a 67-year-old stream ecologist who has partnered with universities, government agencies and nonprofit groups to improve the river he’s come to love.
Sweeten, who lives right beside the Eel River in northern Miami County, has spent nearly a decade implementing projects to improve the river’s quality, safety and biodiversity. Those conservation efforts in 2016 received national attention, when the Eel River was named one of the top 10 improved watersheds by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But transforming the nearly 100-mile river, which runs from Allen County to Logansport, wasn’t something Sweeten set out to do. It all fell into place when he accepted a position at Manchester University as a professor of biology and environmental studies.
Sweeten said he was looking for a good way to give his students some hands-on experience, and saw his opportunity with the Eel River, which runs beside the campus.
“A textbook only provides very limited information,” he said. “In our field, to train a biologist, you need applied experience and understanding on how research works. This provided a great laboratory for us. It was right here in our backyard. It was just like an open book in terms of research.”
The first research effort was studying how water quality affected the spawning habits of smallmouth bass. But the first major project that would eventually transform the river came after Sweeten helped secure federal funding to take out the low-head dams at North Manchester and Liberty Mills.
It took two years to get the proper permits in place; no one had ever used federal money to take out low-head dams in Indiana. But after cutting through the red tape, the dams came down in 2012.
“We decided if we were going to do it, we wanted to study how the stream would respond,” Sweeten said. “What happens when you take out a dam?”
The answer, he discovered, was everything.
“We said, ‘Holy cow, things have changed so much,’ ” Sweeten said. “Dams being gone make the river safer and makes the water cleaner.”
It also opened up large portions of the stream to fish that had been cut off from migrating up and down the river. After the structures were removed, smallmouth bass ended up moving upstream and spawning for the first time in decades.
The success of the project spurred Sweeten to go after funding that would eventually pay for the removal of the dams in Mexico and Collamer, where a 31-year-old Warsaw man died in a kayaking accident in 2017.
Now, Sweeten is working to remove the low-head dam in Logansport.