Efforts to reduce toxic algae in Lake Erie appear to be making progress. Now they face budget cuts
Photo of a 2009 algal bloom in Lake Erie | NASA
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Cuts to a major water-quality program in Ohio’s biennial budget will likely weaken efforts to control the spread of toxic blue-green algae in Lake Erie.
The program in question, H2Ohio, has invested millions of dollars in improving water quality throughout the state. Much of that money has gone toward cutting off the supply of nutrients to the aforementioned algae, also known as cyanobacteria, which bloom in massive quantities every summer. The new state budget, which Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law on July 1, drastically cuts funding for those efforts.
Large blooms of cyanobacteria cause problems for pretty much everything that isn’t algae. They block sunlight and create aquatic “dead zones” where there isn’t enough dissolved oxygen for other organisms to survive. They also release toxins that pose significant health risks to humans, especially to people with pre-existing conditions.
David Kennedy, a professor of medicine at the University of Toledo, described a case of a 7-year-old girl with asthma who was exposed to cyanobacteria while swimming in Maumee Bay.
“Her asthma was exacerbated to the point where she needed to be intubated and had a very long, complicated stay in our medical center,” Kennedy said. The girl did eventually recover.
By reducing the nutrients entering the lake each year, scientists and environmental stewards hope to limit how big the algal blooms get. The main culprit is phosphorus, a key component in agricultural fertilizers, both commercially produced and via manure.
“Whenever it rains, that water goes into the soil, it dissolves the phosphorus just like your sugar in a coffee, and then that water leaves the field carrying the dissolved phosphorus,” said Chris Winslow, director of the Ohio Sea Grant College Program at the Ohio State University.
Some of that water finds its way to the Maumee River, then into western Lake Erie, where the phosphorus it carries becomes food for cyanobacteria. The more phosphorus the Maumee brings into the lake, the bigger the bloom that year.
Nathan Manning of the National Center for Water Quality Research at Ohio’s Heidelberg University said as of June 16 this year, researchers had measured 227 metric tons of dissolved phosphorus flowing out of the Maumee. That puts the likely total for the summer around 235 to 273 metric tons.
“The target … for dissolved reactive phosphorus is 240 metric tons. So there’s a good chance that we will stay below or right at that target, which is good news,” Manning said.
Winslow said that’s a sign everyone’s efforts are paying off, though he cautioned that it’s impossible to say for sure unless those efforts are scaled back.
“We assume these things are doing great jobs to trap nutrients, but the only way you know is to stop doing it. So if we go next year, and see that the dissolved phosphorus goes up and these programs are no longer there, it’s a good indication that they were working,” Winslow said.
With the cuts to H2Ohio, that proof may come sooner rather than later. Since its inception in 2019, the program has tackled the phosphorus problem in two ways: by incentivizing farmers to change their practices, and by funding the construction and maintenance of wetlands.
On the agricultural side, the Ohio Department of Agriculture uses H2Ohio money to help farmers limit how much fertilizer runs off their fields. That includes testing soil to determine how much fertilizer a farmer should apply in the first place, as well as training on things like manure management and overwinter cover crops. Thanks to H2Ohio, farmers don’t have to pay for those changes themselves.
Wetland management, which falls under the purview of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, plays an equally important role. When water passes through a wetland, the plants there act as natural filters, absorbing some of the nutrients before they reach a larger river or lake.
Under the new budget, the Department of Agriculture’s yearly H2Ohio budget is going from $60.8 million to $53.6 million. The Department of Natural Resources is getting hit even harder: Its H2Ohio budget is dropping from $46.6 million to $21.2 million. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency also gets H2Ohio dollars, mostly to protect drinking water; its budget is falling from $27.5 million to just $7.5 million.
Toxic algal bloom in Lake Erie | NASANate Schlater, senior director of ecological restoration at the environmental and economic development nonprofit Rural Action, is overseeing the construction of a new wetland near the Auglaize River in northwestern Ohio, which feeds into the Maumee. He and his team are using H2Ohio dollars for the project. The land was previously owned by a farmer, who sold it to Rural Action because it was prone to flooding.
Constructing could mean various things depending on the wetland. In some cases, it may be necessary to redirect where a stream flows. In the Auglaize project, the team discovered three cars buried along the stream bank in an effort to control erosion, which will have to be removed. After that, there’s seeding the appropriate plants and ensuring nothing invasive takes root in the new ecosystem.
The Ohio State University’s Winslow said it’s also important to keep monitoring the wetland after it’s finished. That also falls within ODNR’s now-reduced H2Ohio budget.
“You can build a wetland and think it’s gonna work, but then when you step back and monitor it, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s not working as good as it should, let’s go in and do X, Y and Z,’” Winslow said.
Schlater said the money for this particular wetland has already been allocated and won’t be affected by the new budget. However, he worries the cuts may make it harder to find funding for new projects in northwest Ohio and elsewhere.
“There’s a lot of great water in the state, and there’s also a lot of impaired water in the state,” Schlater said. “The H2Ohio funding opportunity for the state was really providing a lot of money directly impacting water quality, and any reduction in that is essentially less water that’s gonna be improved, preserved or maintained.”
The H2Ohio cuts are not the only setback this year in the effort to contain Lake Erie’s harmful algal blooms. The Trump administration’s staffing cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have forced that agency to suspend its deployment of Environmental Sample Processors, or ESPs, for the rest of the year. An ESP is a device that automatically collects and processes water samples from a body of water—in this case, Lake Erie—and gives researchers back home an almost real-time glimpse of how much toxin is present in a given part of the lake.
Monica Allen, director of public affairs for NOAA Research, wrote in an email that the organization’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory will train other staffers on ESPs during the winter months, with the goal of resuming ESP deployment in 2026.
Winslow said the cuts may force scientists to scale back how many places in Lake Erie they can sample. Those samples, which are spread over a large area, are how scientists understand what’s actually happening in the lake.
“The data will never be inaccurate. A scientist or an academic institution, if they take a water sample, they are using the highest level of rigor to analyze those samples,” Winslow said. “The one thing that you might see is the number of places that we can sample is not as broad.”
Some monitoring is done with satellites, which Winslow said should continue operating as normal. It’s understanding the chemicals in the water that may become more challenging.
“I don’t think you’ll see a hit in where the bloom is at and how thick it is, but you may see a delay in our ability to predict toxin in those blooms,” Winslow explained.
Exacerbating the problem in the long run is climate change, which is bringing increased rainfall and higher temperatures to the Great Lakes region.
“We’re seeing warmer temperatures, so the lake tends to warm up faster. This type of organism that causes these harmful algal blooms likes warmer water … so they could start showing up earlier,” Winslow said.
However, Winslow stressed that the relationship between the algal blooms and the warming climate is complex. No matter how conducive the weather is, the overall size of the bloom still depends on how much phosphorus enters the lake. What the weather does affect, he explained, is the timing and duration.
“It’s showing up early and lasting longer this time, but the maximum peak that it reaches is less than when it was cooler,” Winslow said.
Exactly what that means for people in the long run remains to be seen, according to Winslow. It does raise the probability that members of the public will see the blooms, but the peak won’t be as severe.
What could become a problem, Winslow said, is if the earlier blooms come when cyanobacteria are producing the highest amount of toxins. That depends on another nutrient that also leeches out of the soil and into the lake: nitrogen.
Nitrogen levels in Lake Erie are highest around the end of June and early July, he said. “And so what we don’t want is the peak to fall there, because then it means you have a bloom that’s huge and crazy and very, very toxic,” Winslow said.
Climate change also poses a potential threat to the mitigation efforts themselves.
“When you’re designing a wetland, you’re designing a wetland based on a certain river dumping into it, how much water’s coming from that river. Well, if we’re seeing more rainfall, we may have designed the wetlands not big enough, or maybe in the wrong place,” Winslow said. “And for farmers, they lose their nutrients when it rains. So the more rain we’re gonna get, the harder it is for them to keep their nutrients on their fields. So all of these solutions, wetlands and what we pay our farmers to do, … they’re gonna be just harder to do because of climate change, because of more precipitation.”
