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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 20, 2015
Contacts

Solutions to harmful algal blooms face roadblock

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Harmful algal blooms have plagued Lake Erie for the past two decades. Most recently, toxins from a bloom entered the drinking water intake near Toledo, OH, leading to a three-day drinking water ban for residents last August. Ongoing research has focused on developing predictive tools to estimate when such blooms will occur and how intense they will be. However, the accuracy of the predictions depends on the data used to create the tools and these data are based on historical efforts by scientists tracking blooms. If the data generated by different scientists disagree, then the predictive tools are less accurate.

A retrospective analysis looking at past studies which tracked blooms finds that there is a lack of consensus among studies, raising questions about the data used to develop future predictions.  Although some government agencies have developed guidelines for tracking harmful blooms, these guidelines are not suitable for all purposes. This has led to ambiguity across studies.

“If we want to make progress on managing these blooms, we need more basic work on how the different methods for tracking blooms agree or disagree,” said lead author Jeff C. Ho, PhD candidate at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science. Only then, the paper argues, will we be able to reverse the trend of increasingly frequent harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie and elsewhere.

Original Publication Information

Results of this study, "Challenges in tracking harmful algal blooms: A synthesis of evidence from Lake Erie," are reported by Jeff C. Ho and Anna M. Michalak in Volume 41, Issue 2 of the Journal of Great Lakes Research, published by Elsevier, 2015.

Contacts

For more information about the study, contact Jeff C. Ho, Dept. of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305; [email protected].

For information about the Journal of Great Lakes Research, contact Stephanie Guildford, Scientific Co-Editor, Large Lakes Observatory, University Minnesota Duluth, 2205 East Fifth Street, Duluth, Minnesota, 55812-2401; [email protected]; (218) 726-8064.