(Image credit: National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science)
The algae in western Lake Erie can party like there’s no tomorrow! At least, no tomorrow for many other living creatures in the lake. Jim Hood (associate professor of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology) is leading a team to better understand the movement of bloom-fostering phosphorous within the surrounding watershed and from the watershed into the lake. This team is highly interdisciplinary, relying on high-frequency monitoring technology to provide data and statisticians to extract information using a highly complex model. For this latter part, Oksana Chkrebtii and PhD student Emerson Webb were primarily responsible for creating the statistical model.
One goal of the project was to better understand how phosphorus is stored in stream sediment or released into the water to travel to the lake, known as the phosphorous cycle. Oksana and Emerson’s Bayesian hierarchical model for stream phosphorous uptake and release rates took into account the major biotic and abiotic components of these processes, such as the role of algae, plants, bacteria and other environmental factors. By fitting the model to high-frequency sensor and monitoring data, the team was able to determine that stream sediment largely absorbs phosphorous that is subsequently unavailable to fuel harmful algal blooms in the lake itself. Conserving healthy streams may be helpful to minimize the size of future blooms. Jim hopes to use this same model in other watersheds to better understand the transferability of what they have discovered and improve our ability to model larger ecosystems.
This work was funded by Ohio Sea Grant, which is supported by The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) School of Environment and Natural Resources, Ohio State University Extension, and NOAA Sea Grant. You can read more about this project in this longer form article: How Do Rivers and Streams Affect Harmful Algal Blooms? October 29, 2024.