(bright music) - Hello and welcome to "The Journal".

I'm Steve Kendall.

For more than 50 years at Heidelberg University, they've been studying water quality in the Maumee River Watershed, Lake Erie, the entire area.

It is now called the National Center for Water Quality Research, and we're joined by the Director, Dr. Laura Johnson.

And, Dr. Johnson, thank you for being here with us today on "The Journal".

- Well, thank you for having me.

It's always a pleasure.

- Yeah.

And, we've talked in the past, but obviously a story that seems to not go away is dealing with water quality, and the lake, and the watersheds that are involved.

Talk a little about what you guys do in terms of the... A little bit of the history and then maybe kind of some of the things you have on tap as we move into the spring as we look at, of course, algal...

Excuse me, algal bloom season.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so as you alluded to, we've been around for quite a while.

We consider 1969 as the start of the monitoring in the lab as we know it today.

And, that was when the center got its first real grant to try and understand what was going on with water quality and tributaries to Lake Erie.

And, if you recall in the sixties and seventies, Lake Erie was the dead lake.

And, part of a lot of the efforts then were trying to reduce what was coming from wastewater.

And, a lot of our early research actually showed that there was a lot more land runoff occurring than was being accounted for.

So, once we started getting into that work, then that's how we started doing our high frequency monitoring.

To date, our monitoring program, we monitor 23 different locations, most of which are in Ohio.

We have one location in Michigan, 16 of those are in at the Lake Erie Watershed.

So, we're monitoring all of the major rivers that you think of that go into Lake Erie, starting at River Raisin, the Maumee, the Portage, Sandusky, Cuyahoga, also the Huron, I always kind of forget about that one, she's a newer addition, and a lot of sub watersheds as well to try to figure out how variable, and where different types of water quality issues might be coming from.

Our focus has mostly been with sediments, how muddy is the water, but also the nutrients that are in that water, nitrogen and phosphorus.

The types of things that you might be adding to your yard is fertilizer or farmers will add as well.

But, it also comes through wastewater, because we consume a lot of nitrogen as phosphorus as well.

It's one of those essential nutrients that sustains all life.

- Well, and you made the point too, you talked about the fact that sixties and seventies, the lake was in dire condition.

Then there was a period where it seemed to clean up it, we were in pretty good shape.

But, then somewhere around after the year 2000, we started to go down this other path again.

So, and I know there were point and non-point sources, that sort of thing.

What caused us to do better for 10 or 15 years, now suddenly we're serious now about, again, the issues that we have with the lake?

- Yeah.

It's a bit confusing to try and really understand all of the things that happened that sort of brought... That went to... You had the lake get worse and or better and then worse again.

But, I can sort of speak to everything that was happening in that period of time.

So, early in a...

In the period of record when Lake Erie was sort of the dead lake, like I said, there was a lot of focus on reducing phosphorus coming from wastewater, also reducing phosphorus that was in some of the household products like detergents, that sort of thing, that was making it harder to control phosphorus coming from those sources.

But, then also around that time on the agricultural side of things, phosphorus fertilizers were fairly cheap and the idea was like, well, we need to apply more phosphorus to our land, so we can build a bank, so that if something ever happens, phosphorus gets more expensive, for instance, then it's there, so we can always have good yields.

And, so all of those things were happening in the late seventies.

Then, phosphorous prices went up, we switched to some new agricultural practices, particularly using vertical tillage or rotational no-till, so you're not turning the soil over as intensively anymore.

Those things seem to be the key factors that improved the lake.

But, then what we think happened is that led to sort of this trade off where once you get to the point where you're not mixing your soil anymore, we tend to see phosphorus and agricultural soils accumulate on the surface of the field, like right on that top part of the... Of the soil surface.

And, that's where we think we started to see an increase in one form of phosphorus.

It's... We call it dissolved phosphorus, it's basically what you can't see that happened in the late nineties through early two thousands, and co assigns with the return of blooms to Lake Erie.

So, that's what we're trying to sort of figure out now is how to deal with that main issue.

- Yeah.

Because, the things that obviously we had put into place, dealt with solid phosphorus, I guess if that's the right term, but the dissolved phosphorus sort of sneaked up on us a little bit, that we thought we were controlling all of it.

And, the practices that were put into place don't deal with that nearly as well.

The research that's in that, what are some of the things that you're looking at to deal with dissolved phosphorate?

Because, obviously it appears it's a chemical that we're gonna be dealing with, a fertilizer that's going to be in place, and I know Ohio's tried different plans, different incentive plans, different things to get agriculture to deal with that issue.

But, what are some of the things we can look at to deal with dissolved phosphorus?

- Yeah, well, I do wanna point out that the sediments and the particulates in our water, those did decrease when we put in all of that.

When we tried to keep our soil on the land, it worked.

And, so we have to remember that sometimes we do things, and it does work, and it does what we want.

Not always.

Sometimes we get these unintended consequences.

So, to deal with something like dissolved phosphorus, part of the issue is what we call nutrient management.

So, when we look at what's happening on a, say a field to field scale, what you really need to do, what we need farmers to be doing, is to be measuring how much phosphorous is in their soil and only applying what's needed.

It may be even less than what's needed by the crop, for that crop rotation, for those couple of years.

Those things really help.

And, that's something that is really is picking up speed, because it's economically a benefit to not over apply fertilizers.

They're not free and certainly not cheap.

So, that's the first step.

The second thing we think would be really important is trying to get away from doing what we call broadcast fertilizer application where you're essentially broadcasting pellets on the surface of the soil, kind of like what you would do in your yard or you see people doing for golf courses, and trying to knife it into the soil a little bit below the surface.

I think those would be the practices that would be really helpful.

- Yeah, and I guess that would make sense, 'cause you're concentrating it where you really want it to be versus just spreading across the entire field.

Well, when we come back, we can pick up there and then talk about, obviously there's a lot of things you're involved in, and this... And, the team that's involved at the National Center for Water Quality Research spans a pretty broad spectrum of... Of disciplines and things.

So, back in just a moment with Dr. Laura Johnson, director of the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University here on "The Journal".

Thank you for staying with us here on "The Journal".

Our guest is Dr. Laura Johnson from the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University.

What we talked about the state of course, looking at different programs that has tried different things over the length of time that we've talked about, more than 50 years.

One of the ones that's top of mind right now is H2Ohio and that's another effort to deal with some of the things you were talking about.

So, kind of describe H2Ohio and what its goals are, what its objectives are, and maybe how it's going to... How it's working, how it's being applied right now.

- Yeah, when you think of H2Ohio, at least in my mind, I think of three different ways in which state funding's being used.

So, one of 'em is through the Department of Agriculture and what they're trying to do is really work at getting practices on the ground in a simpler fashion than how other federal incentive programs have really worked in the past.

So, sometimes the paperwork can be a real big issue.

So, they...

I really applaud Ohio Department of Ag for trying to make the process a little bit simpler.

Their first step was exactly what I said would be the best...

The best fix for phosphorus, which was nutrient management plans, more soil testing.

You can see, if you look at their list online, they also include things like subsurface placement of both fertilizer and manure, and then taking sort of the next steps to try and control water a little bit more.

The flip side is also the wetlands program and that's through the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

And, that's basically saying, okay, well, there's always gonna be some amount of runoff.

How do we clean and filter that runoff before it makes it to the lake?

And, that's where wetlands really, really serve a good purpose there.

When you think of wetlands, you usually think of them as the kidneys of the landscape.

They're really filterers.

And, so...

So, there have been, I think we're up to over a hundred different wetlands that are in the process of being constructed throughout the state, focused in Lake Erie of course, but throughout the state, wherever there's any water quality issues.

And, we're lucky, because we are a part of a team of... That includes six different institutions in Ohio that are monitoring the effectiveness of these wetlands.

So, we can hopefully be able to provide some guidance as to how well they're working, and if they seem to be filling up and getting saturated, we can provide some management guidance on improving the function of the wetlands themselves.

- Yeah, because, obviously, especially where we sit in northwest Ohio, this was a basically one large wetland.

It was a...

It was a swamp.

And, I know that obviously, historically, we can't go back and say what did the lake look like in 1815, or 1750, or whatever.

But, obviously, draining things is... One of the things that I've talked about with other people is the amount of tile that we have placed in the fields in northwest Ohio, which obviously, that's the only way to drain it.

Does that...

Does any of your research get toward that, the fact that we move a lot of water, subsurface water, into tributaries and then into Maumee River and the rivers you talked about?

- Yeah, that's an interesting question.

It's not as straightforward as I would like, but we do notice that a lot of our dissolved phosphorus leaves through tile drains.

A majority of what we call the loading of that phosphorus is coming out of tile drains rather than across the surface anymore, because we've done such a good job at draining our land, so we don't see as many puddle puddles and ponds as we may have seen in the past.

The reason it's a bit confusing is because if we didn't have those tile drains, what would be the opposite?

We know things like if we have a lot of surface runoff, the concentrations are usually much higher coming over the ground instead of through, 'cause that little bit of going through the soil does actually filter out some phosphorus.

So, we wouldn't wanna see that scenario necessarily.

But, we're at a point where thinking about controlling water is sort of on the forefront of our minds.

Like there might be a limit to what we can do in terms of fertilizer placement or application and we might need to be thinking about how do we slow water down, taking advantage of the tile drains we have.

There's these things called controlled drainage structures, you can put to basically stop water at the end of a tile and hold it in the field itself.

Wetlands also do that sort of thing.

And, there's a lot of attention to soil health and using the soil, making it more like potting soil, rather than that brick of clay that you can sometimes see in your yard.

And, that would hold more water too.

- Yeah.

And, one of the things too, I noticed when you look at this too, we've talked about agricultural runoff, but the other thing is too, and I've seen some signs around that says, be wise, don't fertilize, when it comes to yards, because there is some runoff, some of the chemicals used there obviously are the same ones or very similar to the ones we're talking about that farmers apply.

Is... That management's a little different thing though, because that's a little less, there aren't programs to say don't fertilize your yard as we're looking at the ways that we're dealing with agricultural stuff.

But, how big an issue is that, because people say, gee, I can't believe that the little bit of fertilizer I put on my yard is a problem.

But, is that... Is that an issue that we really need to look at?

Is it... Is it that big a part of this, this bigger picture?

Or, is it so small, it's not...

It's not a serious part of this.

- Yeah, when you look at the amount of area that's made up of residential lawns versus agricultural soils in the Maumee, it doesn't seem like it's quite that comparable, but we do know that...

I don't know about you, but I don't test my soil before I would fertilize my yard, right?

So, there's a good practices that you don't see when you get into residential areas.

The good news is that fertilizer, phosphorous and fertilizer for just your normal sort of maintaining your yard type fertilizers actually got pulled from the market I wanna say about eight to 10 years ago.

Scots was the first one to do it and then other name brands followed through.

And, so really unless you're have... Establishing a new yard, you can't find phosphorous in fertilizer anymore.

And, it makes sense, because grass actually responds much more rapidly to nitrogen.

And, nitrogen, it leaves faster.

Normally, if you apply fertilizer and you're doing your... Like a mulching lawnmower, phosphorus isn't gonna go anywhere.

You're just gonna put it right back on your soil.

So, there's definitely good practices that you can do that sort of thing of course and paying attention to it, but it's not as easy to get as it used to be, that's for sure.

- Yeah.

And, it's a...

It's a every little bit helps I guess would be the idea there too that the bigger... 'Cause, I know when you see numbers that say 80% of the watershed, if I believe, is agricultural, and the Maumee River Watershed.

I don't know if that covers the whole state.

And, I know that you guys, as you talked about it earlier, you're not just monitoring here.

You're pretty much covering a huge section of the state's watershed with the monitoring you're doing.

And, obviously that has an impact on how we view things.

Because, I know when I've talked with the researchers here at Bowling Green, it's like the more data points you have, the better off you are, the more inputs you have, the more data, the better you can get an idea of what the picture looks like in reality.

So, the range of things, the area you cover is pretty significant.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And, then on top of it, our different...

The different watersheds that we monitor, they have different land use effects, so we're able to look at that data and sort of separate out, well, what's the effect of like a big urban center versus an agricultural center.

And, then recently, I've been doing some additional analysis, at least on our Lake Erie Watersheds to better understand why we see some of the patterns we see moving from the River Raisin all the way over to the Cuyahoga River, and finding things like slope and soil type are playing a huge role in whether we see more particulate runoff versus, dissolved phosphorus runoff.

And, that kind of helps us identify hotspots of places where this is gonna be a place that's more susceptible to losing the type of phosphorus we don't really wanna lose.

We might wanna be more careful here and knowing that there's other issues in other watersheds.

So, we talk a lot about phosphorus and everything when we talk about the Maumee, but there's different issues in all different parts of the state.

- Okay, well, when we come back, we can pick up there, 'cause there's a couple of questions I have about that.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Laura Johnson, Director of the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University.

Back in a moment.

Thanks for staying with us here on "The Journal".

Our guest is Dr. Laura Johnson, Heidelberg University's National Center for Water Quality Research.

As we sit here near the end of March, winter this year in Ohio was a lot less snow and a lot more rain.

How does that affect the things we've been talking about?

Because, we get huge amounts of rain that are sitting in the fields, that sort of thing, you can watch the tributaries, I can watch one near Grand Rapids, Ohio, and you can see a lot of sediment.

The river will be one color, coming out of this tributary is basically brown looking water, which is sand or soil.

So, how does those large storms where we see the river, especially the Maumee can rise from being almost dried at 10 or 15 feet deep in places.

How does that climate issue factor into how we monitor this and how we can level that or make that part of this discussion?

- Yeah, well, so what we have found over the years is that phosphorus tends to increase with pretty similarly with most storm events.

And, part of the reason is because that is how we manage phosphorus.

We manage to maintain a pool of crop available phosphorus, which means there's always a pool there that's available to run off when we get rain.

Phosphorus works that way anyway.

It's... We call it sticky, it's a sticky element.

It likes to hang on to soil particles and so it doesn't flush away very rapidly.

Nitrogen's the opposite.

So, what we would see from starting March 1st, which is the beginning of the loading season for harmful algal blooms is that each one of these storm events is bringing some amount of phosphorus with it.

The larger the events, because there's more water that has that phosphorus in it, the greater the load or the mass of that making it into the lake.

So, on one hand I could say having a wet start to our spring is not ideal, because if it's a sign of the rest of the spring, we could have a lot of phosphorous loading and that would be concerning.

But, we do also have to remember our loading season, the period of time that does the best job at predicting bloom size and bloom severity starts March 1st and it goes all the way to the end of July.

So, we are barely at the starts of anything.

And, a lot can change over those five months of loading times and it's hard to predict now what's gonna be happening in June for instance.

So, these few rain events, I'm not worried about.

It is awfully wet though.

- Sure.

Now, and you mentioned the fact, obviously, you're gonna be doing research and reporting as we move through the season.

So, what's the plan for that?

What's the timeline now for looking at HABs?

You said harmful algal blooms.

What kind of timeline should we look at to see when we're gonna hear how we're doing as we move through that five month period?

- Yeah, so right now we're just collecting our data as we always have, and sort of... We'll start looking at that in more detail with the start of what we call early season harmful algal bloom projections.

Those usually start really around the early May.

The first week of May is when we start to roll those out.

And, what we do with that is we look at the previous few months of data that we have, we look at the forecast for the rest of the season to the end of July and provide ranges of what we could expect the bloom might be.

So, usually it's a minimum of where we are and then up to some other range and it gives us some perspective.

We do that for about six to eight weeks, and then, at the end of June, we'll have our seasonal harmful algal bloom forecast.

I think that, this year, it's going to be on the 30th if I remember correctly.

It's the last Thursday of June.

And... And, with that, we take what our best estimate is for the official loading, we project it through the end of July, and we pull in other models as well that can forecast.

So, it's not just the NOAA model, but there's also a model from University of Michigan, there's one from Stanford that we use, all three of those, and provide more of a range of what that forecast could be, so that we can understand like... Usually, the parameters are fairly similar, but they have slightly different assumptions.

So, we get our best, our best estimate at bloom severity at that point.

- Yeah.

And, if we look at the past few years, have we seen any kind of a trend?

Because, I know it seems, I know in talking with the...

Some of the folks here at BGSU, they were focused on Sandusky Bay and they were...

They saw some changes they didn't expect based on models they'd been using.

It's like we can't explain why this was better this year.

Theoretically, it should have been worse, because of the conditions we had.

But, as you look at the lake in your research, do you see any kind of trend over the past five, six, 10 years that... Actually, I know the longer you're able to judge, the longer you're able to look at the data, the better your ability to predict or determine whether something's happening or it's a one-off sort of a situation?

- Well, the answer to that is yes and no.

So, first things is we just revisited the sort of underlying relationship, that March through July phosphorous, dissolved phosphorous load relative to bloom size.

And, that is still holding as like the primary dominant controlling factor on bloom severity.

But, that being said, we've had...

The past three years have been fairly mild to moderate amounts of loading.

It's kind of been not a superior wet spring.

I mean, it's been sort of averagely wet and then a kind of dry and hot summer it seems like for the past two or three years.

And, usually, that leads to a fairly mild bloom.

But, what we found last year kind of threw us for a little bit of a loop.

We had a bloom that kind of seemed like it would never end.

I don't know if you remember, last October, it got really warm.

So, the bloom had started to go away in September, it got really warm in October, and it basically came back.

But, it came back as a different algae.

So, usually it's microcytic producing microcystin.

It switched to a form called dolichospermum or doli if you wanna give her a nice name.

So, and so then we had that for a few weeks and then it didn't end until November.

So, we ended up having a more severe bloom than predicted, mostly because the length of it.

It was never terribly awful at any one place except for maybe Maumee Bay State Park, because they always get hit hard.

But, it just never ended.

So, it...

So, we've been trying to incorporate those types of dynamics like surface temperature from the lake and see if that affected the underlying relationship.

And, it's not really coming out very clearly.

So, I think we'll just need a few more years of anomalous data to really understand those impacts.

- And, are there things now, you obviously you have all of these research activities in place, is there something on the horizon, another project you're looking at that will move beyond some of the things that we've talked about so far, the next new approach to see what we can do to solve this issue with the lake?

- Yeah, there's one big project that's just getting started.

We call it the Pilot Watershed Study.

It's in the headwaters of the Maumee.

And, what we're trying to do is implement all of the practices that we think we need at the level that we think we need.

And, one really small watershed.

So, the small watershed is shallow run, it's near Dunkirk.

It's about 5,500 acres.

And, we... Our goal is to cover about 75% of it and practices we think will reduce dissolved phosphorus.

So, that would be subsurface placements, strip tillage, soil health, putting in wetlands.

All of... Everything that we could stack in that, in that watershed.

And, the two goals for that is to see if we can reach the reductions we need to, if we put in all of the effort to see how much it actually would cost to get that amount of implementation.

So, we wanna show proof of concept, but then we also wanna know what's the real investment needed to do that.

But, then also hope, we always get asked how long is it gonna take once we have the practices in place to see the reductions.

And, that's a hard one to answer, because it could take a few years before we start to see big decreases.

And, we're hoping that this project will help with that.

This is a big collaboration.

It's being led by Jay Martin at Ohio State, but, at Heidelberg, we're doing all of the monitoring for water quality.

And, so we're really excited to...

I don't know, see what we can get done, see if we can answer some of these hard questions.

- Yeah.

And, of course, as we know, and we'll leave it there, but, yeah, we want instant response.

We want an answer to our question.

We want it now.

And, obviously, the things we're dealing with here are not things you can answer in a week, or a year, or two years, or even maybe four or five years.

As you said, you need time to see what works, and what isn't working, and then all those other variables that come in, whether it's climate, whatever it happens to be.

So, good.

Well, Dr. Johnson, thank you so much.

Please, stay in touch with us.

We'll stay in touch with you as we move through...

Through the summer and you start to see what kind of summer we're gonna have for HABs on Lake Erie.

It's unfortunately a story that does not go away, but the good news is we're... Research areas like yours are trying to figure out where we can get to the point where we're talking about how good the lake is, not what we can do to keep it from going where we don't want it to go.

So, appreciate that very much.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at Don WBGU PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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