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Lake Harsha: Three Years of HABs Monitoring
Citation:
Allen, Joel, J. Lu, J. Santodomingo, Alan Lindquist, H. Mash, T. Sanan, N. Smucker, C. Nietch, S. Guglielmi, M. Varner, J. Shoemaker, Dan Tettenhorst, K. Daniels, AND T. Neyer. Lake Harsha: Three Years of HABs Monitoring. Presented at 9th US Symposium on Harmful Algae, Baltimore, MD, November 13 - 17, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation covers work done under SSWR 4.01A and will be given at a national conference on Harmful Algal Blooms. The audience will include representatives of Federal, State, and Local governments, water quality managers, academic researchers, and other stakeholders.
Description:
USEPA’s Office of Research and Development has partnered with the Clermont County, OH Water Resources Department in an on-going study to assess HAB trends and develop monitoring tools and approaches. Lake Harsha, a multi-use reservoir and primary drinking water source in southwest OH, has experienced an increase in cyanoHAB frequency and intensity over the past several decades. The goal of this work is to develop relationships between HAB indicator measures and cyanotoxin occurrence which can provide time-relevant information regarding source water quality for DWTP operators and other public health stakeholders. In order to characterize the cyanobacterial population and both intracellular and extracellular cyanotoxin production, an intensive sampling regime was implemented beginning in 2015. High frequency (HF) monitoring (in-vivo fluorescence and physico-chemical parameters) was used to determine the timing and rate of discrete sampling of cyanotoxins (LC-MSMS analysis of select MC congeners and a total MC surrogate, cylindrospermopsin, and anatoxin-a, MC ELISA), molecular indicators, taxonomic enumeration, and nutrients, varying from biweekly, to daily collection during the observed bloom peak. Resulting data provide a time-series of the cyanobacterial population dynamic and greatest periods of cyanotoxin production. HF data coupled with cyanotoxin analyses demonstrate the utility of HF data for tracking the cyanoHAB status of the reservoir. It is also apparent that cyanotoxin concentrations may potentially be underestimated if cyanotoxin sampling is not coupled with bloom status. Data and observations from 2015 to the present will be presented.