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Water Quality Protection of the Grand Lake St. Marys in Ohio
Citation:
Yuan, Y., M. Anderson, AND R. Bingner. Water Quality Protection of the Grand Lake St. Marys in Ohio. Presented at SWCS International Annual Meeting, Lombard, IL, July 27 - 30, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
To provide practical information to government officials and local land owners that helps target the algae blooms in the lake. To achieve long term water quality protection of the GLSM.
Description:
Grand Lake St. Marys (GLSM) in northwestern Ohio is experiencing toxic levels of algal blooms resulting from nutrients, especially phosphorus (P) input from agricultural runoff. Originally constructed as a feeder reservoir for the Miami and Erie Canal, recreation activities on the 13,000 acre lake included swimming, boating, and fishing. The algae bloom has made the lake unsafe for these recreation activities. For many years, the prevailing philosophy of P management was to apply P as a fertilizer at rates that maintain soil P at or above a critical test level. If P fertilizer applications are routinely made above recommended levels, there may be a buildup of soil P in excess of crop needs. With continuous application of fertilizer P in excess of crop needs, the proportion of labile soil P may increase, resulting in even greater losses of soluble P. In addition, other forms of P (less soluble form of P) bound to soil solids are vulnerable to loss due to association with eroded sediment particles transported in overland flow. The increased off-site loss of P has negative impacts on the freshwater ecosystems and is responsible for algal blooms and associated water quality problems in many lakes and rivers, such as GLSM. Questions concerning the long term protection of water quality for GLSM are whether concentrated animal facility operations in the watershed is sustainable in terms of the amount of animal manure produced and whether the conservation practices can be adopted to limit nutrient loadings to the lake. In this presentation, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of environmental sustainability of Concentrated Animal Facility Operations in the watershed, which is critical in guiding the quantity of manure land application to match the needs of the crop through recycling and using excess animal manure as feed stock.