SANDUSKY — Another H2Ohio wetland is being built to improve water quality in western Lake Erie’s Sandusky Bay, this time near the Pickerel Creek Wildlife Area roughly halfway between Fremont and Sandusky.
The project complements others done previously in the Sandusky area near the Cedar Point amusement park.
Some of that work was shown in the fall of 2022 to 35 people, including U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) and some Bowling Green State University researchers.
Scudder Mackey, Ohio Division of Coastal Management director, said the multiple coastal wetland projects in various stages of development in the vicinity of Sandusky Bay are a first for the Great Lakes region. The bay has been a long-overlooked part of Lake Erie that has harbored a different type of toxin-producing algae, planktothrix, from the toxin-producing microcystis that’s in the majority of the lake’s western basin.
This latest H2Ohio project, like others, was heralded in by a news release issued by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
The state agency said it is working with the Nature Conservancy on this particular wetland, which is in Sandusky County.
"This is only the beginning of the H2Ohio wetland restoration work planned for Sandusky Bay,” Gov. Mike DeWine said in the news release.
Work on the site began in April and is expected to last through June, with vegetation being planted throughout the rest of the summer.
“Building a wetland in the bay will maintain water connectivity with the lake, which is vital to supporting fish spawning and nursery habitat and reducing wave energy that reaches the shore and leads to erosion,” Ohio DNR Director Mary Mertz stated in the release.
In 2023, 44 acres of wetland were restored to reconnect Pickerel Creek with its floodplain, allowing more natural water exchange between the stream and adjacent land during storms, the state DNR said.
The effectiveness of H2Ohio wetlands is a topic among scientists attending the annual International Association for Great Lakes Research being held in Windsor, Ont. The weeklong event ends Friday.
One of the presenters was Lauren Kinsman-Costello, a wetlands researcher at Kent State University. She and others made it clear that all wetlands are not the same, and that their effectiveness can vary. Her team is studying about 40 wetlands across Ohio for years.
H2Ohio is the cornerstone of the DeWine administration’s efforts to improve water quality statewide through better farming techniques, new and expanded wetlands, and improved waterlines and other infrastructure. The Ohio General Assembly has authorized millions of dollars a year for the initiative, which began in 2019.
Last June, Mr. Mackey told the Ohio Lake Erie Commission that the overall Sandusky Bay Initiative began in 2015 when he and other coastal engineers got state authorization to rethink how the Sandusky River was being used as it flowed out to Lake Erie’s Sandusky Bay.
Like many areas, a greater focus was put on building and restoring wetlands in response to Toledo’s 2014 water crisis, when an algal toxin in western Lake Erie made tap water unsafe to drink or touch the first weekend of August that year.
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