Lesley Knoll: Creating Home in a New Place

As a Station Scientist at the University of Minnesota’s Itasca Biological Station, Lesley Knoll  discusses what it means to be home in a new place and her love for the winter.

 Lesley conducts research focusing on how global change affects freshwater systems. “My research is highly collaborative and aims to protect water resources facing multiple stressors such as climate change, land use change, and invasive species.”

Yale Climate Connections (1:30): featuring Lesley Knoll's research 

Transcript

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Host: Rebecca Dallinger
This is stories of the land connect. And I'm your host, Rebecca Dallinger. We will hear from diverse people and communities of the Northern and Northwest Minnesota, rural landscape. This is where the Prairie meets the Pines. The headwaters of the Mississippi flows, where the hardwoods and the Tamarack trees meet. This is a place of many rivers, lakes, and watersheds. This is home.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
I talked with Lesley Knoll, the station scientist at the Itasca of Biological Field Station. The station is part of the University of Minnesota and is within a Itasca State Park here in Northern Minnesota, not too far away from Park Rapids or Bemidji. The field station started in 1909 to train forestry students and is dedicated to research and teaching how ecosystems work. There's a lot of history to the Itasca area and it's also the headwaters of the Mississippi. Lesley and I talked in one of the science classrooms about how she intersects with water as a scientist and how living here brings connections and meanings to her life.

Lesley Knoll:
I'm Lesley Knoll. I'm the station biologist at the University of Minnesota, Itasca of Biological Station. I live in Shevlin, Minnesota.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
I wanted to know what is your story of here of this like Northern Minnesota. It could be about water or woods or Prairie or the Mississippi. What is important to you that has created a connection with this land here?

Lesley Knoll:
I'm pretty new to the area. So being around all these pine trees and lakes is very new for me. For me, the story is a lot in the winter and embracing that season because it's this cold that we get and the long, cold and snow that doesn't melt for months and months. I think I'm learning a lot of new activities related to this Northern climate in the winter, especially like snowshoeing, even though I work on lake so much, that's my focus area.

And I appreciate them and love them both from a scientific perspective, but also like the beauty perspective. I find that I take a lot of pictures of them. I also really appreciate the forest up here. And a lot of ways in my off time, that's where I'm spending more of my time on the land than actually on the water. Where I live, we've got about 50 acres and so I spend a lot of time out in the woods with my husband and dogs, just kind of enjoying nature that way. It's just so different from where I grew up having this connection to nature every day at work and at home is something that's really new.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger 
Do you have some example or something that you just remember that was a memory that you just go, oh, that was so cool. That really showed me about winter.

Lesley Knoll:
The first time I was on a frozen lake in a vehicle and the loud popping noises that you get, not the like dangerous sounds. (laughter) Right. But just loud pops that are just natural when it's so cold. That was very like surreal that I'm in a vehicle driving across the lake on the ice and then getting out. (laughter) And I was so scared with the pops and yeah that really made me feel like I was in a new world.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
You talked about winter, really being your favorite time, but why?

Lesley Knoll:
It just stands out so much to me because things really like quiet down on a personal level and on a work level, I guess, too, it's a lot more of a time for reflection. Like you don't see anybody or hardly anybody. And so you really feel more connected to nature when I'm out there by myself or with my husband and dogs then like when you're passing by a million people. I like the way things slow down.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
Why did you start doing work in water-quality?

Lesley Knoll:
So I think something that I've been working on lately related to winter and this time of year from a research perspective is looking at how changes in ice cover from climate change over the say last 150 years is affecting ice cover on lakes. And we're seeing shorter duration of ice cover and lakes all around the world, including in Minnesota. And so I'd been thinking about that and thinking about it from kind of an ecological perspective, like how does that affect the water quality? How does that affect the algae and how does that affect things in the summer too? Cause there's going to be carry over effects from the winter time, but something that I would've never, I feel like gone to or thought of much is how those changes in ice cover affect people.

Lesley Knoll:
In the winter time, there're just tons of people going out, ice fishing, or snowshoeing on the lake or skiing, whatever it is. So I see that every day and the way that people utilize the lake for recreation, to get food, just to get outside and appreciate nature. And so it really got me thinking about that end of things. Like how are people taking advantage of ice covered bodies of water and how is climate change or these vary the variability in ice cover? How might that affect people? And not just the ecology of the lake.  I really don't think I would have started studying that from like an academic perspective had I not been here and seen it every day. It's very different from being on a campus or in a city where you might not interact with that all the time.

I think it's really shaping where my research is going to go too, because I also think about things in the summertime as well, right? And just seeing it all the time, like all the people swimming in the headwaters, the waters down there. What's that doing to the nutrient levels or the sediment? I think just seeing it constantly, you think about things differently.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
How do you think from this perspective of the frozen lake? Do you think there're things that being connected to nature can heal or make change?

Lesley Knoll:
Yeah, I think nature could, can heal or change and in lots of ways, and I think it is different for different people, right? Because one thing that I haven't said yet is that my background growing up, it's not outdoorsy. Like I didn't come from parents that went camping.

Like we were very limited in what we did outdoors as a family. Whereas a lot of people in my line of work grew up in those families that went to the Rockies for a vacation, or did all kinds of camping trips or skiing trips or whatever. But I did not come from that at all. I think that does help me appreciate that different people connect with nature in different ways and they don't necessarily have to get rugged and out in the middle of it to appreciate it or to be changed or healed by it in their own way. But for me personally, it's really helped, helped me to be more centered in a way or calm in certain ways. Because like I mentioned, I liked taking pictures of lakes a lot. Like I just find myself taking different scenery pictures with lakes are usually as the focus area or some sort of water perspective.

Lesley Knoll:
One thing I did in 2018, because I kept like noticing on my phone that all, all of my pictures were just of like natural things like lakes. I decided to take a picture once a day of Lake Itasca, from the same spot, starting January and going all the way to the end of December. So every day that I worked, I took a picture from the same spot at the same time and made basically like this really cool time-lapse. And I think for me, it helped to do that because it like forced me, but in a very using force in a very positive way to like, stop, take this picture every day and appreciate what's in front of me, what I'm looking at. I just really enjoyed it. It was almost like meditative or something. And I miss it. I didn't do it last year that I'm not doing it this year, but I feel like I need, I should.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger 
You can always change it.

Lesley Knoll:
Yeah. I do want to like change.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
It doesn't have to be the same timeframe. It could just be a week.

Lesley Knoll
Oh. But it was so nice every day though.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
You do it, you can do it for just the rest of the seasons.

Lesley Knoll:

Yeah. Well, it looks the same from like January 1st to now, basically anyways. Yeah. Or a different perspective or different time of day. Cause I did it at noon. It would be when I first started, I couldn't figure out what time of day to do it. I think it'd be cool to do it around like 5:00 PM because it's sunset now.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
[teasing] It could be just any time during the day?

Lesley Knoll:
Yeah, but I want to be so regimented, apparently.

Rebecca Dallinger:
The artist is going to push.

Lesley Knoll:
But I do miss it though or miss something like that where I just feel like it's really good for me.

People think I'm very laid back, but I'm actually very anxious. I hide it well. So I think nature helps me to be able to get some of that anxiety out. One of my favorite things is just walking, like taking the dogs for a walk out in the woods. I love doing that.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
Is there a message or something that you feel that you'd want to share with another, that anything that you'd want to just pass forward or pay forward about land, about connection with some of what we're talking about? Just working off of what you're talking about with the truth of the calmness and the centering.

Lesley Knoll:
I think something I'd want to send out to folks when you're kind of thinking about nature and the woods or water is to really find what speaks to you. 

Because again, I think it really is different for different people, right?

What might spark that in you? I think too, this is getting kind of on a different level, but that we only have so many kind of more pristine or unimpacted areas in the world. And we really need to, to really make an effort to keep them because from like a scientific perspective or just in general, as you can see visually, like once you kind of damage that environment, whatever it is, the water or the forest, it's really hard to get it back and sometimes you can't get it back. And so we need to really value what we've got and up here in Northern Minnesota. We often take that for granted that we have all of this. That's why everybody wants to come up here. Right. But we still need to keep it because it's really special. That's why we need to keep protecting it. It's just very important because once it's gone, it's so hard to get it back.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
Is there anything you would tell your younger self about nature from where you are now?

Lesley Knoll:
That's a good question.

I don't know. Maybe I'd tell my younger self when I was like, whatever age it would be when you'd be in Girl Scouts or something to maybe do that because I really didn't get to be out in nature that much until college. Once I started working in a lab that did water research and then that kind of opened up a lot of different opportunities for me. Cause I went into environmental science. Yeah, to try to get those experiences earlier, I think would have been great. And however, that might be, which I think for me, from where I grew up, it would have been something like the Girl Scouts or back then I would not have been allowed to be in the Boy Scouts. But I think you can be now as a girl. 

But I was quite a trailblazer at that point.

Host: Rebecca Dallinger
Many thanks to everyone who's been part of telling their stories of the land/connect. Thank you for the generosity of your time and the beauty of your words. Again, I am your host, Rebecca Dallinger. Special thanks to mentors and podcasters. Shirley Nordrum and Zach Paige. The theme song is by Zach Paige, you could find Zach's podcast seed stories on his North Circle Seed company page. This series couldn't have been done without the generous support of the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum and the Itasca of Biological Field Station, as well as the generous support of Extension’s Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships also known as RSDP. To find out more about sustainability projects in your county, go to extension.umn.edu/regional-partnerships. 

Thank you.