[AUDIO LOGO] Wetlands are like the Earth's natural water filters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wetlands are a really great water quality tool.

They're also an aquifer recharge tool.

They're also a habitat tool.

And there's a local partnership led by the Missouri Department of Conservation to install floating wetlands in some of our local bodies of water, including Fellows Lake, McDaniel's Lake, Valley Water Mill Lake here, some parks around town, and some private residents.

And these are little islands of diverse native plants that provide a habitat.

They're beautiful.

And also, they're sucking up nutrients out of the water, essentially filtering the water.

CU's interest in the floating wetlands project is primarily water quality.

Seasonally, we get nutrient dumps, like we've had here in the spring, when we get a lot of rain.

And that rain water runs off into our lakes and reservoirs.

When we get a mix of nutrients, sunlight, and warm temperatures, it's just prime conditions for algal blooms to occur.

And that negatively impacts the water quality on the source side.

KARA TVEDT: Then, once the nutrients get in the water body, you add sunlight to them.

Then you start getting your plankton blooms.

That makes the water a little greener.

It can give it an off taste.

WILL SAPPINGTON: The more algae that is present in our lakes and reservoirs, that comes at a treatment cost.

It is not aesthetically pleasing.

And nobody wants to drink water that doesn't taste good.

So this is a tool in the toolbox to hopefully better the conditions of the source water, which eventually benefits the drinking water.

What we do know, floating islands and wetland plants benefit nutrient transformation, or recycling.

And so every bit that we add is beneficial.

Just a few little wetlands can make a difference.

You can almost see immediate reduction in filamentous algae.

WILL SAPPINGTON: With this solution, we're being preventative.

Being able to do a natural remedy for a natural cause is really awesome, and it's being self-sustaining.

And it comes at a one-time cost as opposed to an ongoing cost.

MIKE KROMREY: Wetlands are a key for water quality.

This is actually a constructed wetland.

There aren't many wetlands in Southwest Missouri at all.

But we wanted to have a wetland here to showcase what they're all about.

This is helping water soak into the ground.

It's helping flood waters slow down and spread out.

It's allowing some of that sediment, which we don't really want in the lake, to add to our wetland area here, which is kind of a plus.

FRANK NELSON: The fact that we planted it this year, they're going to continue to grow and become more and more robust and thick.

It's exciting to see that kind of change and growth over the years.

It's going to be its own little ecosystem and habitat.

There's never a silver-bullet solution.

You have to come at it from multiple angles.

And so this is just one way in which we can target and try to-- if nothing else, try to reduce the extremes of algal blooms.

And by providing this habitat, the plants and the microbes that are working on the nutrients itself, try to reduce the harshness of algal blooms that are so hazardous to human and wildlife health.

This is an opportunity in which we're trying to work with folks where they live, trying to expand maybe people's expectations of where they can do conservation and where we can meet them in their own backyards.

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