CONFERENCE PROPOSAL: WETLANDS MITIGATING HARMFUL ALGAL BLOOMS

Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers FL

Investigators

Abstract

This grant is in partial support of a workshop on wetlands mitigating water quality problems. The workshop will be held on August 3, 2019 on the shores of Lake Erie in north central Ohio, The workshop will include presentations on early research results from ongoing wetlaculture experiments in Ohio and south Florida, the role of wetlands in mitigating algal toxicity, current studies of large-scale wetland restoration and creation of wetlands for water quality control, as well as studies by a UNESCO lab in Poland on ecohydrological approaches to dealing with harmful algal blooms. Landscape-scale approaches are needed that integrate wetland retention of nutrients from stormwater and polluted rivers and ditches with a recycling mechanism that will return those nutrients to agricultural production, thereby decreasing downstream eutrophication, including harmful algal blooms and hypoxia, while reducing the requirements for additional fertilization for agricultural production. Treatment wetlands in high-nutrient landscapes integrate food (agricultural production), energy (solar-based ecological systems replacing fossil-fuel-based treatment systems) and water (water quality improvement. The western basin of Lake Erie will be the feature of several of the presentations and probably most of the discussion at our workshop. It has suffered extensive late summer algal blooms for the past seven years, starting with the then-largest recorded algal bloom in Lake Erie in 2011 and leading to a total shutdown of the Toledo Ohio water supply in 2014. Subsequently, one of the most extensive algal blooms occurred in 2017 in Lake Erie. Restoration of some of the former Black Swamp of northwestern Ohio has now been proposed for the strategic purpose of reducing nutrient inflows to the western basin of Lake Erie. There are many scientific inquiries that need to be implemented before the feasibility of a restoration on this scale can be attempted. Research is needed on wetland design in this former-wetland landscape, and on whether the wetlaculture approach would work well in this region. This workshop will focus on identifying and articulating the required research needs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.