Abstract
Since the early 2000s, Lake Erie has been experiencing annual cyanobacterial blooms that often cover large portions of the western basin and even reach into the central basin. These blooms have affected several ecosystem services provided by Lake Erie to surrounding communities (notably drinking water quality). Several modeling efforts have identified the springtime total bioavailable phosphorus (TBP) load as a major driver of maximum cyanobacterial biomass in western Lake Erie, and on this basis, international water management bodies have set a phosphorus (P) reduction goal. This P reduction goal is intended to reduce maximum cyanobacterial biomass, but there has been very limited effort to identify the specific locations within the western basin of Lake Erie that will likely experience the most benefits. Here, we used pixel‐specific linear regression to identify where annual variation in spring TBP loads is most strongly associated with cyanobacterial abundance, as inferred from satellite imagery. Using this approach, we find that annual TBP loads are most strongly associated with cyanobacterial abundance in the central and southern areas of the western basin. At the location of the Toledo water intake, the association between TBP load and cyanobacterial abundance is moderate, and in Maumee Bay (near Toledo, Ohio), the association between TBP and cyanobacterial abundance is no better than a null model. Both of these locations are important for the delivery of specific ecosystem services, but this analysis indicates that P load reductions would not be expected to substantially improve maximum annual cyanobacterial abundance in these locations. These results are preliminary in the sense that only a limited set of models were tested in this analysis, but these results illustrate the importance of identifying whether the spatial distribution of management benefits (in this case P load reduction) matches the spatial distribution of management goals (reducing the effects of cyanobacteria on important ecosystem services).
Highlights
Lake Erie is a large lake on the border between the United States and Canada
Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems (MEA, 2003), and examples include drinking water, commercial fishing, water purification, and many related to tourism or recreation
In the area where our spatial analysis identified a strong influence of Maumee River total bioavailable phosphorus (TBP) loads farther out into the western basin, we found that the TBP and discharge models have more support (ΔAICC = 0 and 0.8, respectively) than a null model (ΔAICC = 9.3) or other potential predictors (Table 1)
Summary
Lake Erie is a large lake on the border between the United States and Canada. This lake, its tributaries, and river mouths feature prominently in the history of environmental regulations as an indicator of both failure and success in terms of water quality (Adler, 2002; Reitze, 1968). While spring/early summer loads of TBP appear to have a relatively strong association with the total biomass of cyanobacteria in western Lake Erie (Bertani et al, 2016), the actual waters of the Maumee River are not mixed randomly throughout the western basin or Lake Erie as a whole This creates a uneven spatial distribution in the distribution of primary production and an uneven distribution of potential effects on ecosystem services (Fang et al, 2019; Manning et al, 2019). We used pixel-level regression models to identify where benefits of the target TBP load reductions will be greatest and least
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