This past spring, a group of teenagers waded through Waynesville’s Richland Creek under the watchful eye of Suzanne Orbock Miller, but they weren’t there to splash and play — thanks to an innovative grant program linking universities with local partners, Miller’s Tuscola High School students were gathering important scientific data.
“They were super-excited. Then again, any time they can get out of the classroom, they’re super-excited,” Miller laughed. “But when they got there, they realized that this was serious.”
Months earlier, for the fourth time in 20 years, regional waterways again slipped their banks amid torrential rainfall produced by Hurricane Helene — wrecking roads, swallowing homes and once again exposing just how vulnerable the mountains of Western North Carolina are to extreme weather events.
But while local governments scrambled to assess damage and families began the long road to recovery, a quieter wave was already gaining strength, powered by the state’s universities and funded by an organization just nimble enough for moments like this.
“Literally the next day, we started having discussions,” said Jeff Warren, executive director of the North Carolina Collaboratory, a state-funded research entity headquartered at UNC-Chapel Hill. “Let’s look at all available funding that hasn’t been sent out the door.”
NC Collaboratory was established in July 2016 by a legislative mandate in that year’s biennial budget — originally a simple little provision that talked about creating an entity that would bring the scientific and policy expertise of academia to bear across the state by standing up projects with local partners, local governments and state governments. Since 2016, the Collaboratory has grown into a $225 million operation.
“Often, we will get studies sent to us that are mandated in a bill, but we can also do discretionary studies where we know there would be legislative interest,” Warren said. “Sometimes it’s things we find that are opportunistic and timely that may not be on their radar.”
That conversation the day after Helene was one of those opportunities and marked the beginning of an unprecedented rapid-response academic initiative. With hundreds of thousands of dollars reallocated internally, the Collaboratory sent out the call to researchers at three of the UNC system’s western campuses: Western Carolina University, UNC-Asheville and Appalachian State.
“We said, ‘Look, these are the people that were impacted. They live in these communities. They’re local. Let’s start reaching out,’” Warren said. “And we got a wonderful response.”
The response came after serious deliberation on how to respectfully approach deployment in a region where so many had lost so much.
“Humanity has always got to come before science,” Warren said. “You want to be respectful of the local communities impacted. I would argue that the best thing we could probably do moving forward before the next natural disaster is actually set up some training for researchers. You can’t just drive up into a holler and walk up to people’s front doors.”
Projects funded by the Collaboratory aren’t just about data. They’re more about application.
That real-world focus starts with project design.
“On every grant, every funding agreement specific to Helene, we required a partnership, a non-academic partnership,” Warren said. “Projects came in working with local governments, working with a state agency, working with local nonprofits.”
Ultimately, NC Collaboratory decided on making $10,000 microgrants — modest amounts meant to spread the money as far as possible.
One of those grants went to Jerry Miller, the Whitmire professor of environmental science at Western Carolina University.
“So there’s really three components to it,” Miller said of his research. “During Helene, you got massive amounts of deposition on the floodplain, as well as erosion of the floodplain deposits in the channel. What we did is, we went out and immediately sampled those deposits after the event.”
When Miller looked for a local partner, he didn’t have to look far; since 2004, his wife, Suzanne Orbock Miller, has been an environmental educator at Tuscola.
“For the last 20 so years or more, I’ve taken my students out to look at water quality in the streams of Western North Carolina, since they live here,” Suzanne said. “They were good field trips. They have looked at macroinvertebrates, looked at turbidity, looked at sediment.”
This past spring, they were looking to trap a certain species of caddisfly, which are reliable indicators of good water quality.
“The work that Tuscola was involved with and Haywood Waterways and us was initially focused primarily on Richland Creek,” Jerry said. “Where the sediment ties into the caddisfly is that the caddisflies are of course bottom-dwellers and represent fish food, but they’re also getting their nest, their casing, and building that casing out of the sediments.”
Bad sediment means bad caddisflies which means less trout and a cascade of consequences up and down the food chain. Students collected around 150 of them on two trips to send off for study.
“They were amazed at the amount of life beneath their feet that they never even considered,” Suzanne said. “I always find that very cool as a teacher, you know, that it’s their own discovery and I’m just providing an opportunity for them to do that.”
Arthur said that kind of engagement is part of what makes the Collaboratory unique.
“There is nothing like this anywhere else in, I would say, by far, the country — possibly the world,” she said. “Academic research is extremely important for advancing knowledge, but it also has tremendous capacity to benefit people in the real world now.”
The sediment samples collected by Jerry and his team were analyzed for two main groups of contaminants, trace metals — lead, cadmium, zinc, mercury — and microplastics, which Jerry called “a new emerging contaminant.” Both can negatively affect caddisflies.
Trace metals, he said, move through a watershed by clinging to sediment and end up in the floodplain as deposits.
“That’s where the danger lies. The concern is that those concentrations of the metals could be high enough that they would pose a risk both to ecological health — organisms other than humans — as well as human health,” Jerry said.
Contamination doesn’t always come from modern industry; from the 1910s through about the 1950s, lead arsenate was widely used as a pesticide, particularly on apple orchards. Barber’s orchard in Waynesville was once a superfund site for that reason, however there’s always been plenty of metals, dangerous in sufficient concentrations, that are present in the soil.
“We actually have fairly high concentrations of trace metals in a lot of the sediments naturally,” said Jerry. “There are layers in the bedrock called sulfidic layers. These are sulfide minerals, and when they get exposed to oxygen, they’ll oxidize and get released into the environment.”
Copper, too, has been widely used as a pesticide and also in consumer products that end up in landfills, or worse, as trash in bodies of water.
With his Collaboratory grant, Jerry’s team was able to collect samples at about 15 different sites throughout the Pigeon River watershed.
That meant identifying the high-water mark, calculating elevation above the channel, describing vegetation types and soil texture and then systematically collecting samples across different floodplain environments.
“The point of all of this was that our sampling would be able to tell us where metals are being concentrated, as well as microplastics,” Jerry said. “If there was a remediation that had to take place, you would be able to identify where those hotspots are, and that would guide your remediation protocols.”
His team has already shared preliminary findings with some of the landowners who allowed access to their properties.
“Based on our preliminary data, [the metals] are about what we would expect from background,” he said. “There’s nothing there to be really concerned about.”
Still, further and more specific analysis is coming. That work builds on an earlier round of screening using X-ray fluorescence.
“It’s a really good method to get kind of a quick and dirty understanding of what the concentrations are,” said Jerry.
Meanwhile, Jerry’s team also investigated microplastics — tiny synthetic particles left behind by tires, textiles, packaging and personal care products. Microplastics move through the system very differently than the metals do.
“The metals have a pretty high density, much higher than water. Plastics, some of those have a density less than water, so they float,” he said. “Some have a density just slightly above water, and so they might sink.”
One unexpected result Jerry’s work has already revealed is that microplastic concentrations are actually lower now, after Helene, than they were before.
“The driving force is that the floodplain deposits, a lot of those as you go deeper and deeper in the floodplains, date back a few thousand years,” he said. “They’re probably pretty clean. They wouldn’t have any anthropogenic contamination, microplastics. Anything before about 1950 is probably devoid of significant microplastics and during the flood, we got massive amounts of erosion so you’re eroding a lot of those very old deposits, and they’re getting mixed with the more recent sediments. And so it had a dilutionary effect. There’s a cliché that’s used a lot in contaminant hydrology — ‘the solution to pollution is dilution.’”
The Collaboratory’s grant helped Jerry’s team of five graduate students get into the field fast, less than a month after the storm, and mainly paid for travel expenses, meals and surprisingly expensive testing supplies.
“It was really nice to get out there and get data before it vanished,” he said. “In some of our sites, we had sediment on farm fields and things like that, and they were out there with bulldozers cleaning it up.”
Internal support quickly followed, positioning the Collaboratory grant to serve as seed money until additional funding could be utilized. A grant from the university provost’s office in the amount of $15,000 helped not only Miller but also chemistry professor Al Fischer and his students, who oversaw the analytical process. The Whitmire endowment also contributed to the project, which Miller said was run “on a shoestring.”
Jerry expects several different academic papers coming out of his efforts, likely by spring, and he’d like there to be some public component to their publication.
“There’ll probably be one looking at the floodplain, where most of the sediments were deposited,” he said. “Then probably at least one paper on the trace metal contamination … and then one or more on the microplastics.”
In all, NC Collaboratory funded 21 Helene-related, place-based research projects — everything from mosquito population studies to systemic financial risk analysis to chronicling the lessons learned by local law enforcement.
Other Helene projects, with bigger price tags, include a $2.1 million reallocation of funds for cutting-edge standalone wastewater treatment plants delivered to the town of Hot Springs, which lost its own plant during the storm, and a sophisticated mapping project that could save lives in the future.
“We have a very large investment of right at $4 million that we used to go ahead and acquire laser elevation and digital photo data from across the hardest hit counties in Western North Carolina, 13 counties, and those are slowly coming online and being heavily utilized by local governments,” said Warren. “The thrust of that was just to make the data available to local governments as a decision-making tool, an analytical tool.”
Even before Helene, the Collaboratory had established a good track record by financing other projects with real-world impact.
“We have funded probably around 750 grants across the entire UNC system,” Warren said, adding that they’re currently supervising around 300 and that they were recently approved to work with non-public universities like Campbell, Davidson, Duke and Wake Forest. “That would include the School of Science and Math and the School of the Arts.”
Warren pointed to one example of a project that’s come through the research phase and entered the startup phase.
“Years ago, we embarked on a multi-pronged effort, with a lot of funding out there, but we have one particular team that developed a technology that was very promising to remove PFAS from the water, specifically drinking water,” he said. “And here we are, three-and-a-half, four years later, and it’s been a significant investment. It’s been over a $10 million investment.”
The product is currently removing PFAS from water three or four times as fast as current state-of-the-art technology can and utilizes a reusable resin that helps drive down cost.
“You can strip the PFAS off, concentrate them, deal with them with other technologies to destroy them but use the resin again and again and again,” Warren said. “Technology is what makes science real for the non-scientists.”
Arthur said seeing a physical product come to life is also encouraging for scientists who want to see results from their research.
“A lot of researchers get into this business wanting to impact the world in a positive way,” she said.
The Collaboratory has also funded research in energy, child welfare and the foster care system.
“We have partnered with some absolutely fantastic DSS offices across the state,” Arthur said. “And the DSS directors are the ones who are in the driver’s seat. Rather than just have a lot of researchers do their theoretical work, we want to make sure that any research is really driven by their local questions in their local counties.”
In another case, UNC-Wilmington received funding for a mass spectrometer — then gave the local utility company training support and access.
“The utility company invites students in,” Arthur said. “They are committed to helping with career development and training.”
That sense of purpose drives the Collaboratory’s mission. “We like to give [the public] things that make their lives better,” Warren said. “Knowledge is part of that. Technology is a very big part of that.”
But in a larger sense, perhaps the most important accomplishment to come out of the Collaboratory’s effort is the encouragement of a whole new generation of scientists like Jerry and Suzanne.
“One family from Pakistan really stands out, because both she and her brother and her cousin were in my class and she was just thrilled, because she said in her country, they would never do this until they were in graduate school,” Suzanne said. “This is something she was aspiring to. And it was fall, and all the leaves were falling down, and she was in the middle of the creek, and she’d seen all these macroinvertebrates and the light was shining, I mean, it was shining through. She was just, like, turning in circles. She said, ‘This is so beautiful. What an adventure.’”