Photo by Samantha Davis Southwest Minnesota State University student Elayna Geiser shows her poster presentation on ‘Framing Reality,’ which discussed how documentaries influence public attitude toward social issues during the 19th annual Undergraduate Research Conference on Wednesday at SMSU. 

MARSHALL — Southwest Minnesota State University undergraduate students presented a range of research presentations they have been working on for months throughout the day on Wednesday on campus in the university’s 19th annual Undergraduate Research Conference. 

The conference, open to the public, originally began in 2006 and has only grown since. This year has been the biggest turnout yet with 15 programs participating and 121 student presenters between 15 oral presentations, 68 posters and 16 virtual presentations. 

Topics varied between environmental science, art, sports, health care, economics, traditional and social media, geography and more. 

Senior Devin Bahl gave a poster presentation on “Kittenball During the Depression in Minnesota,” which was a sport that resembled softball. 

It (Kittenball) was mostly played during the Depression … It was kind of like the precursor to softball in Minnesota and the Midwest,” Bahl said. “Most of the leagues that were made were from Redwood County … Then, softball kind of took over at the end of the Depression, like 1939.” 

The sport was co-ed and originally created by Lewis Rober around 1900, according to Bahl. 

Although the ball used was much larger than a softball, and more so the size of a medicine ball, players didn’t use gloves. But they still ran bases. 

“They changed it to two bases (at one point), but then they went back because it was too different from baseball,” Bahl said. 

Bahl came about the topic for his project randomly, and got immediately intrigued and dived into researching. 

“I went to the Lyon County Museum and went through a book about important things that happened during the depression,” Bahl said. “I saw the word ‘kittenball,’ but I didn’t know anything about it. So, I went through newspaper articles.” 

As students and faculty gathered in the upper conference center to watch the oral presentations, and the lower conference center flooded with people to check out the presentations, positive remarks and enthusiastic conversation could be heard in observation about the topics. 

Joren Palmer and Benjamin Skorczewski each gave presentations about water quality studies they conducted. 

Palmer did a study titled, “Comparative Water Quality Analysis of Developed and Undeveloped Lakes in Ottertail Count, Minnesota,” where he analyzed differences in the water quality between shorelines on lakes.   

“Minnesota is the land of 10,000 Lakes, so high quality water is very important to us,” Palmer said. “Otter Tail County is located in west central Minnesota. It’s known as the ‘lakes region.’ The county itself is home to 1,048 lakes.” 

Palmer chose a handful of lakes in Otter Tail to base his study on. 

“I chose 10 total lakes, five with developed shorelines and five with undeveloped shorelines,” Palmer said. “Each lake, I tried to keep them all within the same size range. The average depths are eight feet to 19 feet deep.” 

Palmer described a natural shoreline as a body of water where you’d find a more diverse and abundant aquatic vegetation, and protects the water more. They also adapt better to changes in precipitation levels and seasons. 

With lakeshore developed shorelines, there is an increased surface runoff from urban areas like yards and roads. They also are more prone to damaging vegetation and increased erosion. 

“The main nutrients we’re worried about are going to be nitrogen and phosphorus,” Palmer said. “With that higher input of these nutrients, it may lead to eutrophication events, which is basically just high algae blooms in a body of water. With that high algae bloom, they can deplete the oxygen resources and lead to a fish kill.” 

Through the use of various educational equipment and working on each lake through public access, Palmer found that both developed and undeveloped lakes had around 1 to 1.01 nitrate parts per million.

Palmer also said there wasn’t a major statistical difference with the two on chloride and ammonium levels. 

“The Secchi Disk Depth (the depth where a weighted disk can no longer be seen from the surface of a body of water) in developed and undeveloped lakes, this was my only significantly different water quality parameter,” Palmer said. “Developed lakes had about 3.2 meters of clarity, whereas undeveloped lakes had about a little over 1.5 (meters of) clarity.” 

Skorczewski’s study tested the population of geese on three ponds around SMSU, and how they affect water quality. 

“There are 1.4 million Minnesotans who get their water from surface water. That would be getting a lot from rivers, lakes, ponds, man made reservoirs, anything like that,” Skorczewski said. “The main problem that we were looking at was eutrophication. And eutrophication happens when nutrient levels such as phosphate and nitrogen become elevated, and cause the algae levels to increase.” 

Skorczewski found that the pond in front of the SMSU sign attracted the most geese, which steadily increased throughout his time doing the project through the fall. 

Skorczewski said he found the highest ammonium levels in the baseball field pond, and there wasn’t anything major found for phosphate levels in all three. 

“For the nitrate levels, they were all relatively similar until around October 25th. The day before I did my testing, there was a rain event and the baseball field pond has a couple different inputs from streams,” Skorczewski said. “One of the streams is surrounded by agricultural fields. Using that information, I decided that it is most likely that inputs from runoff in those fields caused a high increase of nitrate within that pod.” 

Keynote speaker Macy Violett opened the event in the morning. She graduated from SMSU in 2018 and went on to get her doctorate at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. She currently works as an occupational therapist at M Health Fairview Southdale Hospital in the Twin Cities. 

Violett spoke about how participating in research still plays a pivotal role in her career today, and the importance of asking questions and working with confidence.