Lucas County and Toledo leaders Monday showed off findings of a joint project to identify sources of nutrients that feed harmful algal blooms in western Lake Erie, with initial reports showing agricultural areas south and southwest of the city responsible for much of the phosphorus.
The Toledo-Lucas County Sustainability Commission’s project — the Western Lake Erie Nutrient Source Inventory — is in its second phase, in which it modeled nutrient sources in the Lower Maumee watershed. The modeling shows that flat areas with heavy agricultural use — such as areas between Leipsic and McComb — produce significantly more nutrients that enter waterways than urban areas such as Toledo.
“To no one’s surprise, it’s not the urban areas,” Lucas County Commissioner Tina Skeldon Wozniak said. “It’s [agriculture].”
Identifying where nutrients that feed algal blooms originate from allows public and private entities to target remediation efforts more efficiently, county and city leaders said. The amount of phosphorus and other nutrients that end up in Lake Erie can then be more effectively reduced.
“This issue is vital for the continuing growth of our region,” Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson said.
Leaders showed off the new data and web tool, found at the commission’s website, during a news conference Monday at the National Museum of the Great Lakes in East Toledo.
Getting the data is important, County Commissioner Carol Contrada said, but plans to reduce nutrient runoff must be developed.
“Accountability needs to be a component,” she said.
The civic leaders said their goal was not to point fingers at rural communities. They wanted to provide hard data that can help raise awareness and also be used as a tool to direct scarce resources. For some time, doubts have been sown about whether its large-scale farming that contributes to algal blooms, or instead more easily found point-source polluters in urban areas such as Toledo.
The project, funded with $250,000 from the city and county, uses publicly available data, with engineers then developing models to expound on that information. The next step, said Tim Murphy, a former city official now serving as senior project manager for Civil & Environmental Consultants, is to do additional water sampling to both confirm the model’s projections, and also track progress on remediation efforts.
Color-coded layers over a map show the areas with the highest nutrient runoff, and models also show the impact remediation efforts would have on the runoff. By switching to no-till farming techniques, the use of subsurface fertilizer injections, and a reduction of fertilizer use by half, the whole Lower Maumee watershed would be in improved ranges of runoff, according to the model.
“We aren’t saying stop farming,” Mr. Murphy said.
Right now, however, there are few concerted efforts underway in the southern watershed to reduce nutrient runoff, he said.
Contact Nolan Rosenkrans at nrosenkrans@theblade.com, 419-724-6086, or on Twitter @NolanRosenkrans.
First Published December 18, 2017, 9:24 p.m.
