CHICAGO, IL (April 7, 2026) – Today, the Alliance for the Great Lakes and its partners announced a new, publicly available dashboard that provides near real-time data about water quality in the Western Basin of Lake Erie.
Nutrient pollution is a severe threat to water quality across the Great Lakes region, with particularly acute impacts in the Western Basin of Lake Erie. Excess phosphorus runoff fuels harmful algal blooms that contaminate drinking water sources, threaten public health, degrade aquatic ecosystems, and disrupt local economies dependent on fishing and tourism. Compounding the problem, there has historically been no centralized system for monitoring water quality upstream of Lake Erie, leaving the sources of nutrient pollution largely untracked and making it difficult to strategically allocate conservation funding to the areas where it can have the greatest impact.
To address this data gap, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD), awarded a $4.86 million grant to the Alliance for the Great Lakes and its partners, LimnoTech and Michigan State University, to install water quality monitoring equipment across five priority sub-watersheds. The project is also supported by a $600,000 grant from the Erb Family Foundation.
“To protect Lake Erie from pollution, we have to know where it comes from and how it travels through the watershed,” said Angela Blatt, Alliance for the Great Lakes’ Senior Agriculture Policy Manager. “This monitoring network and the public dashboard will help agencies, farmers, and communities better target conservation and land management practices to prevent pollution from running off the landscape into our shared water. We applaud the leadership of Director Boring, who has continually emphasized the importance of expanding monitoring and data collection to help guide conservation decision making.”
“At MDARD, we’re focused on science-driven solutions that improve our understanding of nutrient loss and transport so we can make meaningful progress toward water quality improvements. This expanded monitoring network and the new nutrient tracking dashboard are concrete examples of the innovation that the public and private sectors can deliver when we work together,” said MDARD Director Tim Boring. “These powerful tools will provide real-time data that helps agencies and organizations – and the farmers and communities we serve – take targeted actions to keep nutrients on fields and out of our waterways. I’m proud to support this work and grateful to our fellow partners for bringing this dashboard to life.”
The project uses higher spatial density monitoring instrumentation with a particular focus on understanding phosphorus trends. The comprehensive monitoring network has been collecting data since October 2024, and now this information is available on a public dashboard at: https://greatlakes.org/wlebmonitoring/. Findings based on the first year of data collection underscore the role of landscape characteristics and targeted restoration in mitigating event-driven runoff and sediment losses.
“This project uses high tech sensors and sampling methods to get a glimpse of how fast water runs off the landscape and how much sediment and phosphorus is in that runoff at 50 points within these watersheds. Every rain event is an opportunity to look for signs of progress and improvements in each of these sub-watersheds. We will be able to detect changes faster and report back on progress sooner than downstream monitoring,” said Ed Verhamme, Senior Engineer at LimnoTech, who is working to maintain the equipment on behalf of MDARD.
The monitoring spans five of Michigan’s priority sub-watersheds – Lime Creek, Stony Creek (South Branch River Raisin), the headwaters of the Saline River, Nile Ditch, and the S.S. LaPointe Drain. The system, which is currently funded through 2029, tracks area hydrology, sediment transport, and phosphorus transport across these landscapes. To develop a more complete understanding of nutrient loading in these priority watersheds, the project’s monitoring extends beyond streams to include subsurface agricultural drains.
“Edge-of-field studies show in certain areas that most of the phosphorus leaving farm fields is transported through tile drainage systems,” said Jeremiah Asher, Assistant Director of the Institute of Water Research at Michigan State University. “By deploying a high-density subsurface monitoring network in the South Branch of the River Raisin, we aim to improve our ability to understand, predict, and ultimately manage nutrient losses from these pathways.”
The online dashboard makes most of the project data available for viewers to see real-time conditions at all 50 locations. A project landing page shows each watershed and allows the viewer to navigate the different types of sensors and view recent and historical data trends. The project dashboard also has sign-in capabilities where users can download data.
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Contact: Don Carr, Media Director, Alliance for the Great Lakes dcarr@greatlakes.org