(upbeat music) (graphic pops) - Hello and welcome to the Journal, I'm Steve Kendall.

the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University in Tiffin has been monitoring what's been going on in Northwest Ohio's wetlands and tributaries over the summer.

We're joined by Nate Manning and Jakob Boehler.

Welcome both of you to Journal.

Appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

Nate, kind of give us an overall view of what's going on this summer, because there's been things in the news about what Lake Erie looks like, that sort of thing.

But kind of give us the overview of what it's been like this year regarding the wetlands and the waterways here in northwest Ohio with regard to nutrients and the phosphorus things that we are always talking about.

- Sure.

So the spring, we had a fairly wet spring, at least in sort of relation to the last, you know, five years or so.

And then, you know, starting in July it just sort of stopped raining, and we really haven't had much water, you know, throughout the summer and so that really sort of changes how the loading patterns that we see into the lake, into Lake Erie, how they change over the season, right.

So we relatively high total phosphorus and sediment in the spring, early spring particularly, April and May.

And then it's really sort of fallen off since then.

I mean, when it comes to, you know, the harmful algal blooms, right, having lower loading, particularly in the late spring, is good, right.

But, you know, when you look at the agriculture and the wetlands and that sort of thing that really rely on that water, you know, you have some issues there.

And so it's a bit of a mixed bag this year.

We did see some lowered loading numbers, which we like to see when it comes to, like I said, harmful algal blooms, but we really need some water, you know, especially.

You know, we monitor wetlands around northwest Ohio and for the most part they have been bone dry, you know, especially over the last couple of months.

- Yeah, now, given what you've just described, would we be better off with consistent moderate rainfall, like just general weather versus lots of water in the spring, nothing in the summer?

It'd make it easier for you guys to monitor and be able to look at your data, I'm sure to say, things are at least consistent that way.

because the weather's another variable now that it figures into how you look at your data.

- Sure, and you know, when we have these really intense storms, right.

So we got a lot of water in the spring, but it really came from only a handful of events, right.

What we call, you know, storm events.

And when you get those, you know, big pulses of water, right, coming through, running off of the fields into the rivers, right.

So it strips everything off of the fields, right.

And then once it gets into the river, it's moving so fast that it starts causing what's called bank erosion, and resuspension of stuff that's down in the bottom of those rivers, right.

And so it's essentially bringing up older phosphorus, older nitrogen, nitrate, you know, and transporting that that had been in the stream banks and in the bottom of the rivers.

And so yes, if we could get nice even rainfall, you know, across the season, that'd be, you know, for us on the monitoring side, but also in terms of reducing that, you know, sediment pulse and you know, these sort of gully washers, right, that we get that cause a lot of problems.

- Yeah.

And Jakob, you're the field manager.

You're out there.

How has your summer gone with regard to what you've been seeing literally, you know, in the field as you go about what you do, monitoring all of these various wetlands and the tributaries?

- Yeah, so like Nate said, you know, the weather has definitely impacted things with the drought conditions here.

So of our like a dozen wetlands that we monitor as part of the H2Ohio Wetland Monitoring Program, I think eight or nine of them are pretty much completely dry at this point.

We had similar conditions last year.

We had a drought, you know, this time last year as well.

I think this year is getting a little bit worse from what I'm seeing out there.

We have fewer wetlands with water in them.

And like Nate said, that can impact, you know, phosphorus release and things once they re-wet and all that.

So right now the wetlands aren't really functioning to, you know, remove phosphorus 'cause there's no water in them.

But once they get that water in there, we'll see hopefully with the wetlands, from what we've seen from our soils data, most of these wetlands are at the point where when they do get re-wet, they should be absorbing phosphorus, rather than releasing phosphorus, which is what we'd want to see.

And so, that would be good as far as that goes.

And then for our Tributary Loading Program, so this is where we have our 23 stations throughout Ohio and southeast Michigan.

Of those, currently this week, we are down six or seven of those sites just because they're smaller streams.

And so we even have some small streams around the area that are just dry right now that we can't actually get samples from 'em as well.

So it's not just impacting the wetlands, it's impacting the streams and stuff as well.

- Yeah, and Nate I know was down at a park a couple of weeks ago, the Maumee River, one of the Toledo Metro Parks, and you could literally walk across the river and not get wet.

And that's a, not a necessarily a totally unusual situation, but then I was looking at the sediment, at the rocks, at the stone and thinking, you know, what happens then, as you just described, here comes, you know, a storm and now you've got all of that stuff that was sitting there dry, now moving.

And I guess when you guys look at this kind of a summer, do you set that aside kind of as an outlier?

Or is this becoming more the norm that we're gonna see?

- Yeah, you know.

We look at, you know, the year that we're in, but we also look at past years to try and look at sort of trends over time, right.

One of the statistical models that we use, it's called W-R-T-D-S, it was developed by the USGS, and it looks back in time, right, to build these models of how nutrients are changing, you know, in the rivers over five or 10 years.

And so what's happened in the last couple of years definitely plays into sort of how we understand, you know, just the mechanics of transporting these nutrients.

And so, you know, over the past five years we've been down in what we call discharge, just the amount of water out of, you know, the Maumee River or the Sandusky River.

And so, you know, it's sometimes hard to compare, right, the last five years to the, you know, five years previous, or you know, a five year block 20 years ago, where, you know, the amount of involved is different, right.

Because that changes the calculations that we do to try and, you know, try and understand how these nutrients are moving.

And so, you know, sort of long-term trends were down, right, down in the amount of water, not just compared to the five years previous, but sort of the long term, you know, 50 year trend.

It's come back up a little bit.

Again, we did have a wet spring, and so when we look at sort of the annual, you know, the total amount of water that came through in the year, it's up a little bit this year, based on, you know, the five years.

But we're still below where we would sort of want to be, I suppose, where we would expect to be based on long-term trends.

- Okay.

Yeah.

When we come back, I'd like to talk about the broader area because obviously we're looking at the Maumee watershed, but Ohio has programs they put in place to address this, other states too, because the watershed stretches over into Indiana and other places.

And things that may be not within our control, management, practices, that kind of thing, and how you manage that as you look at all those variables from the different jurisdictions treating this issue the way they think they should treat it.

So we can talk a little about that when we come back.

Back in just a moment with Nate Manning and Jakob Boehler from the National Center for Water Quality Research, at Heidelberg University.

Back in just a moment.

You're with us on the Journal.

Our guests are Nate Manning and Jakob Boehler from the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University.

Nate, when we left that last segment, various jurisdictions are looking at ways to address the activities in the watershed, in the tributaries, in the lake, all the bays, that sort of thing.

Ohio has addressed it specifically with a program called H2Ohio.

So talk a little bit about your involvement and what that's meant to researchers like you that now Ohio has put that program into place.

And the impacts you may or may not be seeing based on, it's been relatively short.

It hasn't been around for a long, long time, but are you seeing anything that looks like, hey, we've got some things that are working here, or better eye, better practices that are gonna help us?

- Yeah, so, you know, H2Ohio's sort of a multi-pronged effort, right, to improve water quality in Ohio.

The NCWQR we're involved on sort of the wetland side of that, of monitoring, restoring, rebuilding the wetlands that were lost around Ohio over the last, you know, century.

And, you know, we're seeing good numbers out of that.

Some of these wetlands that we're seeing are removing huge amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen from the systems.

And, you know, I think the goal of that really is to understand sort of return on investment on some of these, you know.

If you restore a whole bunch of little wetlands, right, is that better than one big wetland?

We're still trying to figure that out.

But we've got lots of people involved.

Kent State, Toledo, Bowling Green, Ohio State, Wright State and us we're all involved in doing this monitoring.

There's an agricultural side right, to H2Ohio.

And that's really been successful in getting a lot of these sort of best management practices in place in these, you know, agricultural centers around Ohio.

There's some issues right now with that, just with having enough people essentially to, you know, make that project, you know, that program really sort of work as it's intended.

And there's a rivers section as well that's just sort of starting up now, that will be focused on, you know, river health.

And a lot of that focused on the Ohio River and its tributaries.

So, you know, it's a lot bigger than just, you know, a couple of wetlands, right.

It's a huge program and has been as we can say right now, it's been successful, right.

That it's doing and the areas that it's been seen progress.

And so the hope is that, you know, we'll have enough sort of progress to be able to show, you know, that this is a program that needs to continue to help, you know, with the water quality issues in Ohio because we have a number of them.

- Sure, sure.

And Jakob, has H2Ohio altered the way you approach things in the field in any way, more reporting, different kinds of data collection, that sort of thing?

How has that impacted what you do on a daily basis in the field?

- Yeah, so definitely for us, we were primarily always, you know, in the rivers doing stuff here in the lab.

And so, once we took on this project looking at wetlands, that was new for us.

And so it's kind of changed what we have there.

We have a full-time wetland technician, that's a position that we haven't had before.

And so this person's sole job is to go out and monitor wetlands and I help them with that.

And figuring out, you know, when to go out and sample, all of that stuff, what to sample, all those sorts of things.

And so, as far as like what we do sampling wise out there, we're looking for mainly water grab samples.

We also do soils so we can see how that phosphorus and nitrogen is moving within the soils and stuff like that.

And then other universities, so like Bowling Green has the vegetation crew that they focus on what's going on with the vegetation in the wetlands and how that's impacting the nutrients, and other things like that.

And then because of the size and the number of organizations involved with this project, Kent State has been tasked with kind of leading this whole cause here of the wetland monitoring program.

And so they actually do a large amount of data management.

So all of our data that we collect, we have to report to them, and then they go through and do QC work on it, and then they get that back to us so we can analyze the data.

And it's been a very, very big collaborative project to figure out how to monitor all these wetlands across the state.

- Yeah, and I guess as you talk about that too, as all of this data comes in, data come in and you're looking at all of that, are you ever, and either Nate, or one of you can respond to this, do you ever see conflicting information like, oh wait a minute, Kent's showing this and that doesn't make any sense to us because we're seeing this?

Or is it because of the geographic spread, you might see different data coming in versus what you think should, you thought might be going on?

- Yeah, I think definitely we can see that, you know, across the state you're gonna have wetlands functioning in a different way.

A lot of these wetlands that are being installed are different types.

So they might be a floodplain wetland, some of them are flow through, some of them are just isolated pools.

And so we see, I think it'd say across the state, for the most part, we see that the same types of wetlands are behaving relatively similarly.

But, you know, we can have a lot of rain over in this part of the state, or no rain like we're having right now, and they're still getting rain in other parts of the state.

And so we see differences just because of that, the weather patterns and things like that as well, so.

- Yeah, and Nate, I'm assuming that all of you folks from the various universities that you've mentioned, you get together, you talk, you communicate about what you're seeing, that sort of thing.

Is that like a consistent thing that you do where you're talking with your colleagues at all the other research centers, that sort of thing?

- [Nate] Yeah, so we have, you know, weekly meetings, you know, especially with the base crews.

But then, you know, once a month we have the main PI meeting.

So all of the, sort of the heads of the different programs at the different universities.

And then every year we have an all hands meeting, in person all hands meeting where everybody, you know.

And it's a large program, right.

We have 75, 80 people involved in it when you look at, you know, professors and, you know, grad students and undergrad students and technicians, and, you know, it's a large program.

And so we are in really regular conversation, you know.

And definitely, you know, Kent State does a good job of sort of, you know, wrangling all the cats, right.

Herding cats.

- [Steve] Sure, sure.

- With all the different universities and grad students and all of that involved, you know, it can be difficult, but they're, you know, they're doing a good job.

- Yeah, well, we come back, we can talk about, you know, what the plans are for the future, what things you guys see as directions you want to go, or things you've identified now that need more research, that sort of thing.

Because obviously the more data you have, the more you start to develop other questions about why are we seeing things, why are we not seeing things?

Why did this happen?

Why didn't this happen?

So we can talk about what the future looks like when we come back in just a moment.

We'll be back with Jakob Boehler and Nate Manning from the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University.

Back right after this.

Thank you for staying with us.

Our guests are Nate Manning and Jakob Boehler from the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University, one of the many universities in Ohio monitoring and looking at what we're doing with our wetlands and our tributaries and our rivers, and of course, Lake Erie and Sandusky Bay and all of basically the places where water exists in Ohio.

We've talked about what you guys have been doing this year, what's on the horizon, what are the next things that you might start to look at that maybe you haven't addressed in the past or things you've just picked up on based on what you've seen, you know, this year so far.

What are some of the new things you're gonna be going to?

- Yeah, so, you know, I think a lot of the focus is turning towards, you know, legacy phosphorus.

So essentially the phosphorus that was applied, not this year, maybe not even the year before, but you know, two years, five years before, that still is in the system and still being supported.

You know, essentially trying to figure out how old is the phosphorus that we're seeing getting out into the lake, right.

Is it really just what's happening that year, or is it, you know, an effect of many years of, you know, phosphorus applications.

And that gets back into that sort of stream bank erosion, right.

How much is, you know, the actual banks of these rivers contributing to that.

I've seen a lot of sort of interest in that moving forward.

We're currently involved with a project through the Cleveland Water Alliance, and ultimately from the USEPA, looking at technology focused on manure lagoons, right.

And treating dairy, in this case it's dairy farms, you know, dairy manure to make it, you know, useful to be able to be put onto the fields and not cause, you know, these issues that we can see with manure applications around the state, right.

And so, you know, I think there's an understanding of what's happening on the agricultural side, right.

But we now sort of have to dig deeper into sort of the mechanics that underlie, right, the transport of that phosphorus and that nitrogen and sort of link the fields to the lake, and understand, you know, sort of those transport mechanisms.

- Yeah, and that brings up a question, you're talking about that.

You know, there was that recent incident, I believe in Sandusky County, where there was a spillage of, there was an over application or whatever of liquid manure to a field, something of that scope.

Does that register when you look at your data?

[Steve] Or is that small enough that it doesn't, it's there, but it doesn't pop up and go, oh my gosh, look at the numbers.

They went crazy.

And there's a long term effect to that.

I mean, because people are gonna say, how big a deal was that?

- [Nate] Yeah, so at the local scale, right, it's a big deal, right.

If you live within a couple of miles of that spill, that could be a big deal.

When we look at the entire watershed, particularly, you know, one as big as, you know, the Sandusky or the Maumee, right.

The Maumee is the largest watershed in the Great Lakes.

A spill like that generally does not make much difference to the annual, right.

We could maybe see it, right.

We could maybe pick it up in our monitoring and see a little spike from it.

But when we sort of add everything up, right, we're talking megatons, right, in many of these instances of phosphorus.

And so yes, it's a problem.

- [Steve] Right, okay.

I don't wanna low ball it, but yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

- Particularly at the local scale.

But when we look at sort of the annual, right, that's just sort of a little blip in the data.

You know, if it was continuous, if you have like a facility that's just constantly, you know, once a week is dumping this, you know, into the rivers that would cause a problem.

But isolated incidents like that generally are not long term problems.

- Yeah And Jakob, a question for you, and I'm kind of.

Lucas County is in the process, the Swan Creek watershed, which is one of the two main tributaries that run to the Maumee and into Lake Erie.

They're gonna undertake a, what appears to be a massive cleaning of all of the ditches.

Will you guys see any of that, Jakob, when you start monitoring?

As they start to clean things that haven't been cleared in basically a hundred years, it's gonna alter the way a lot of those streams and ditches and tributaries look.

How do you guys factor that into what you start to see?

because that's a big, that's a big change as that water starts to move in a different way than it has, you know, over time for the last a hundred years.

- Yeah, so our monitoring station there on the Maumee is actually upstream of that.

So we won't see that directly through our data.

But we do see this routinely.

Every county out here in our area, in these agricultural area that we're in, they go out and they routinely clean their agricultural ditches out.

So they dredge them out, the farmers will reach out, or they're just on like a, every five, 10 year cycle, something like that.

And so we do see maybe little spikes in like sediment, or suspended sediments, that sort of thing from that.

And we might see spikes in phosphorus or related to that as well, potentially.

But it is hard to pinpoint that because like Nate was saying, you know, we have this one site we are sampling at and seeing those little tiny changes are a little bit hard to figure out.

So that's where, like another project that we're involved with is the pilot watershed project.

So this is down in the Blanchard River, and they actually have two smaller watersheds.

One of them is having a whole bunch of agricultural best management practices put in place, and the one is not.

And so now we can kind of compare and see how these things are really more doing at like defined scale to figure out what's working, what doesn't work and that sort of thing, so.

- Now, you know, when we talk about this, we usually are talking scale, we're talking agriculture, that sort of thing.

When you drive around, you'll see people who have signs in the yard that says, you know, don't fertilize your yard because that's a load factor too.

How significant.

And when you guys, and you look at your numbers, is that something that is a, it's a contributor obviously, but is it that significant compared to say the things you've talked about so far?

Nate?

I'm sorry, Nate?

- [Nate] No, generally not.

- [Steve] Okay.

Sorry.

- So an individual, right, fertilizing their yard is so small that we can't see it.

But an entire town, right, an entire township that's doing it, now you have a problem, right.

And so it's, right.

All of these, you know, little bits, little bits, little bits.

- [Steve] They all add up.

- They all add up, you know.

And so, you know, like you said, an individual, like a manure spill probably isn't, you know, a big deal in the big picture.

But if you have many of those.

- [Steve] Lots of them.

- If you have lots of them over time, then they start to become an issue.

And it's the same with, you know, fertilizing your lawn.

Like, does one person doing that make the difference?

No, but lots and lots of people, you know, an entire town doing it, that does make a difference.

- [Steve] Yeah, because it's phosphorus.

- [Nate] It's a scale thing.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Nate] It is.

It's, you know, it's a scale thing, when you look at, you know, the size of the Maumee River, and the size of that watershed and the amount of water and the amount of nutrients that are moving through there, you know, it really takes a long term concerted difference, right, to make a change.

And we're seeing that with, you know, the agricultural practices in the Maumee, right.

I had said earlier that, you know, discharge was down and so loads were down with that.

But what we are also seeing is the flow weight mean concentration.

So the concentration that's then corrected for the amount of water is also coming down for phosphorus and nitrogen in the Maumee.

And that's a really good sign, right.

That means that it's not just because it hasn't been raining, it's not just because there isn't a lot of water.

It's because there have been fundamental changes to the amount of phosphorus that's actually getting into the river.

And a lot of that can be contributed to, you know, changes in agricultural practices, you know, things like the H2Ohio program.

- Yeah.

Good, good.

Well, we're gonna have to leave it there and obviously you guys will continue doing what you do and we'll get back with you in the spring, or any time that something comes up you think we need to know about, because obviously managing this whole issue is not just a today thing, a next year thing, it's an ongoing thing.

And we appreciate the work that you do, Nate, and also you Jakob, you know, keeping an eye on this.

And things are improving and that's good to hear because I think we're all concerned that we're, hopefully we're making progress to get this back in a spot where we'd like it to be.

So thank you so much for doing this.

Appreciate it.

- [Nate] Thank you.

Yeah, we're making progress.

It's just, it's gonna be slow because of the size of the watershed that we're dealing with.

- [Steve] Right, right.

Good.

Okay, well, we'll keep following it.

And we'll stay on top of it, and we appreciate you guys doing that as well.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 PM, on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Goodnight and good luck.

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