Before northwest Ohio was filled with fields of corn and soybeans, it was covered in slimy mud and standing water.
“Northwest Ohio was once a 1,500-square-mile swamp that stretched from the shores of Lake Erie all the way out to Fort Wayne, Ind.,” said Rob Krain, executive director of the Black Swamp Conservancy.
When European settlers moved to the area around 1850, they used clay pipes to drain the swamp.
“And [it] turned into some of the highest quality farmland found anywhere in the world,” Krain said.
But in doing so, they altered the landscape so dramatically it no longer functioned the way it used to. Without big trees and native grasses to suck up nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, those clay pipes whisked excess fertilizers directly into nearby streams, where they flowed into Lake Erie and eventually fed harmful algal blooms.
To prevent that from happening, conservation groups like the Black Swamp Conservancy have been trying to restore some of the natural landscape.
In recent years, they’ve been able to do that with financial backing from the state’s H2Ohio program. Started in 2019, the initiative has poured millions of dollars into wetlands restoration work.
But now, some worry whether that progress will continue. The newest state budget contained sweeping cuts to H2Ohio: In addition to slashing funds from the Ohio Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency, it halved the amount of money allocated to the Department of Natural Resources for wetlands restoration work.
Wetlands restoration projects
In the few years before H2Ohio came into existence, the Black Swamp Conservancy had restored two wetlands, said Melanie Coulter, the organization’s conservation manager.
“After that, we’ve done 16 restoration projects,” she said.
One sits along the bank of the Maumee River in Henry County.
“What we’re doing at this spot is changing the floodplain from a farm into a more natural floodplain with lots of little pocket wetlands throughout,” Coulter said.
Now every time it floods, plants in those pocket wetlands pull excess nutrients out of the river.
To the west, another restored wetlands in Paulding County works a little differently. As water drains from farm fields, it trickles through a series of natural pools.
“Each step of the pool is reducing more and more and more of the nutrients before it goes into the stream,” Coulter explained.
Efforts like these have paid off: Despite variations from year to year, scientists say the amount of phosphorus in Lake Erie has declined over the past decade.
But without sustained funding, some worry progress will stall, if not reverse.
“The H2O Ohio program has been a tremendous, tremendous opportunity for Ohio to preserve, improve and further protect our water resources,” said Nate Schlater, senior director of ecological restoration with Rural Action, another organization that’s received H2Ohio funds to restore wetlands.
“Any reduction in H2Ohio dollars will ultimately result in a reduction in the amount of water that we can preserve and protect in Ohio.”
What do budget cuts mean for the future?
The ODNR says it’s assessing H2Ohio projects and hasn’t made any final decisions about what’ll happen next.
On one hand, Chris Winslow, director of the Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State University’s Stone Lab, says there’s been so much research about building wetlands in recent years, that scientists now have a better idea of what works.
“An argument could be made that you've got enough wetlands out there, and you’ve got enough science now, that even in a reduced budget, you could probably have more bang for your buck because when you build a wetland you know exactly how it should be built,” he said.
The Black Swamp Conservancy’s restored wetlands in Paulding County, for example, is more effective than the floodplain wetlands in Henry County.
Even so, Rob Krain with the Black Swamp Conservancy says there’s still a lot more work to do. As the conservancy has worked to bring wetlands back, Ohio’s farms have been getting bigger and bigger.
“So the practices and the management that is leading to this problem is continuing to put further and further pressure on the water, on the landscape, on Lake Erie,” Krain said.
Improving the health of Lake Erie in a lasting way, he says, will take more than a few years of investment.
“It took us 150 years to get to where we are today. And the idea that this problem can be solved in five or 10 years is just not realistic. It's going to take a long, sustained effort if we are going to fix Lake Erie and ensure the freshwater future of the state of Ohio.”
