Institute of Water Research

Project Summary

The research effort, funded by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources (MDARD) in partnership with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, utilizes expertise from Michigan State University's Institute of Water Research and LimnoTech while leveraging additional funding from the Erb Family Foundation. This significant increase in research and monitoring will aid the state's strategy in developing a plan to combat harmful algal blooms in the WLEB.

Harmful algal blooms occur when colonies of algae grow out of control. Some produce dangerous toxins which can have harmful effects on people and wildlife, but even non-toxic blooms can hurt the environment. The algal blooms need sunlight, slow-moving water, and nutrients to grow. Phosphorus pollution from human activity can make the problem worse, leading to blooms occurring more often.

Monitoring is taking place in five priority HUC-12 sub-watersheds: Lime Creek, Stony Creek (South Branch River Raisin), Headwaters of the Saline River, Nile Ditch, and the S.S. LaPointe Drain. These subwatersheds were selected for more focused and accelerated activities including finer-scale water quality monitoring, completing agricultural inventories, prioritized BMP implementation, and assessing the costs associated with full implementation to achieve a 40 percent total phosphorus reduction goal.  In-stream data collection will include stream flow, total phosphorus and soluble reactive phosphorus, turbidity, and total suspended solids. These gauge stations will be combined with soil moisture, precipitation, and tile outlet sensors deployed through the watershed to better understand the fate and transport of nutrients in the WLEB watershed.

Understanding, tracking, and predicting nutrient loads from the WLEB watershed is difficult due to the complex drivers of nutrient loss within sub-watersheds in the WLEB including variable weather, cropping systems, farm management, nutrient cycling. By increasing monitoring capacity in the WLEB at smaller sub-watershed scales, with an emphasis on deploying higher spatial density monitoring instrumentation, this research effort will improve the understanding of the impact of various drivers on nutrient transport and enable improved prioritization of conservation and land management practices to meet phosphorus reduction commitments set for Michigan’s portion of the WLEB.