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When a major infrastructure project comes to town, it can become a herculean effort to locate information about the development and its potential environmental impacts.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources hosts an online permitting database. The website serves as a public repository of documents related to projects like large livestock farms, mines and even mock beaver dams.

But queue it up and face an onslaught of records.

If it takes a grown professional to decipher the documents, what would it take for a teenager to care?

A student club in Stillwater Area Public Schools, located in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, is exploring methods to bring such esoteric data to life.

At a recent environmental forum in Hudson, Wisconsin, the youth showcased their work, including constructing a submersible robot that will assess water quality in area lakes.

Another project examined water quality in the St. Croix River watershed — spanning both Minnesota and Wisconsin — including the potential impacts of a proposed Burnett County hog farm. 

That animal operation was the subject of a three-part Wisconsin Watch investigation, which found that the developers improperly designated some farmland for manure spreading without the property owners’ consent. 

Wisconsin regulations require the owners of large farms to own or rent a sufficient land base on which to apply livestock manure, but Wisconsin Watch verified that at least 11 of 39 landowners listed in the farm’s plan were not contacted. Some hadn’t decided if they wanted manure on their land, while many objected outright.

Even after the developers proposed hauling excess manure to Minnesota, the Wisconsin DNR rejected their application.

The hog farm would have been constructed in the headwaters of the St. Croix River in the town of Trade Lake. Field runoff ultimately would have flowed downstream to Stillwater.

Livestock farming in the St. Croix River watershed introduces fecal waste equivalent to 3.25 million people, according to estimates produced by retired University of Iowa faculty member Chris Jones, who specializes in water quality monitoring. 

Area drinking wells already exceed nitrate standards, and residents feared that manure from an additional 20,000-pig farm would be a toxic addition.

Michael Manore, founder and project lead of the “This is Stillwater” initiative, which partners with the student club, created the digital model of the watershed showcased at the forum. He said the visuals sharpened the scope of the hog farm’s possible impacts: widespread manure hauling, roadside spills and odor.

The school district’s Synergy Club, led by Julie Balfanz, encourages students to visualize data in novel ways, using tools like the computer game Minecraft.

“So many of these ideas came from the kids because this is what they’re into,” Balfanz said. “But they just don’t have adults that listen to their ideas and let them experiment.”

Manore and Balfanz hope their efforts inspire youth to respond to community challenges, including environmental sustainability and water quality.

In a digitized world, human attention is an increasingly valuable commodity, and Manore realized that more than a dozen state and federal agencies govern surface water and underground aquifers, producing an “insurmountable” puddle of data.

“So much of sustainability is checkmarks or checkboxes on a brochure,” he said. “I go out and stand in my environment and I sniff the air or I dig my feet into the ground or I swim in the water. I don’t have a clue what that checkmark box translates into the true raw health metrics of my community.”

Now Manore is pondering ways to dispense with screens altogether — or at least plant them in nature.

Could tech use DNR records to augment reality like an interactive game of Pokémon GO?

Manore sure hopes so.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

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