The Ohio Department of Natural Resources has constructed, restored, or enhanced wetlands throughout the state with the goal of capturing nutrients to improve water quality, and mitigate harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie. The H2Ohio Wetland Monitoring Program was developed to evaluate a subset of those wetlands, measuring inflowing and outflowing nutrient concentrations to understand both the amount of nutrients wetlands retain, and what drives that retention. Three years of monitoring data shows that wetlands that are more connected to flowing water are more successful at nutrient retention. While monitoring is focused on only a small subset of the full number of constructed wetlands our data can be used to understand the potential for the full number of wetlands to treat nutrients across the entire watershed. Our results suggest that when wetlands are hydrologically connected, they are an effective method to mitigate nutrient loading to larger waterbodies such as Lake Erie.
