During the event, Ohio Sea Grant director Dr. Jeff Reutter and research coordinator Dr. Justin Chaffin were on the phone with the U.S. and Ohio Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA) as well as city officials from Toledo to help inform their management of the issue.

But August 2014 was far from the first time Ohio Sea Grant worked on the front lines to restore the health of Lake Erie. Nutrient loading, algal blooms and the dead zone – an area of low oxygen that develops in the central basin during the summer – have been an important part of Ohio Sea Grant’s work since 1971 when the Center for Lake Erie Area Research (CLEAR) was formed.

“Our efforts to bring Lake Erie back from its dead lake image to becoming the walleye capital of the world were a success,” remembers Reutter. “However, once decision makers felt that there was no longer an acute problem, funding and monitoring for further research were diverted to other focus areas.

That change in priorities has come back to haunt Lake Erie again in the past two decades. Steadily increasing concentrations of phosphorus – a vital nutrient for agriculture crops that also fuels harmful algal blooms in the lake – have resulted in an increase in the occurrence and severity of algal blooms. The western basin, which receives runoff from the Maumee River watershed, the largest agricultural watershed feeding into the Great Lakes, is especially affected by phosphorus levels that have returned to what they were during the height of the problem in the 1970s.

While funding from the U.S. EPA for water quality monitoring ended in the mid-80s, students at Stone Lab continued to conduct an informal monitoring effort, and Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Lab began to prepare for the current situation in the mid-90s.