When it comes to science, there's something to be said for longevity. Consider the Lamprey River.

The Lamprey, which flows 212 miles from Northwood through Durham to Newmarket, isn't exactly a huge river but it is the largest contributor of fresh water to the Great Bay. That means it is also the largest source of the nutrients which are vital to the bay but also the largest source of excess nutrients that can overwhelm the bay from runoff.

Keeping track of what is happening over the years would help understand how to cope with similar situations throughout the state. Fortunately, that's what we're doing.

"It's a watershed going through the process of suburbanization, like many places in New Hampshire," said Adam Wymore, an associate professor at UNH who recently became the new director of the New Hampshire Water Resources Center. "The landscape is slowly changing as society is changing and it's a great place to track those changes and the implications for our water resources."

Since 1999 the center has been observing the Lamprey River in a project started under its former director, recently retired Bill McDowell. For two and a half decades, researchers and students have collected data about the changing water flow, levels of nitrogen and greenhouse gases and dissolved organic matter, calibrating the effect of development throughout the watershed as well as the changing climate.

That latter point is significant.

"You can only track something like climate change with long-term records. ... A 3-year project is great in many ways but you can't track that kind of change with it," said Wymore.

The data is specific to the Lamprey but can be generalized to similar watersheds in the state and region. And our towns and cities are going to need all the information they can get in coming years if we want to keep our streams and rivers from getting overwhelmed.

This research isn't actually the main job of the UNH-based New Hampshire Water Resources Center. Its founding principle is to distribute grants for research related to water quality and quantity in New Hampshire. The center, one of 54 set up in every state and territory, runs a competitive grants program using money from Congress passed through the U.S. Geological Center. The program was established in the 1960s because we realized that only government money can ensure long-term projects like this.

A decade ago I wouldn't have cared too much about it, to be honest. New England has always been in a pretty good spot hydrology-wise - not too wet, not too dry - so what's the big deal? But the climate emergency, with its biblical floods followed by flash droughts, has shaken my complacency.

"We're bouncing between extremes. 2023-24 was an extraordinarily wet year, and all of a sudden the faucet turned off," said Wymore, referencing our current drought. "This has brought uncertainty into our daily management of life."

Wymore, a Massachusetts native who came to UNH as a post-doc 11 years ago, has been assistant director of the center since 2020. He says the main change he sees happening is that it has become "very centered on the effects of climate change."

"Climate change introduces a level of uncertainty which we are still grappling with. ... That is really the new urgent priority: how that interacts with changes in land use, with population growth. It's the interaction of those factors that we need to understand," he said.

Which brings us back to long-term studies: "Continuity is really important for the questions that we're asking."

At this point I'm afraid I can't avoid politics. The Trump Administration's blueprint for action, Project 2525, would gut the USGS with the idea that private companies will take over the useful bits and somehow do it better.

But there is absolutely, positively no way that private interests would fund 25 years of measuring chemistry and hydrology on an unexciting river when they can't monetize the result. If we destroy accumulated expertise and experience in the name of simplistic "market good, government bad" thinking, then the measurement will stop and we will be more ignorant.