On a calm November day on Lake Erie, the air wasn’t filled with the sounds of squawking seabirds or even passing boats.
Rather, a dump truck rumbled down a rocky bank, depositing its load into the shallow water.
“The truck that just came in had a ton of sand in it and that is to help create a substrate that's good for plants to get started in,” said Ashlee Decker, a restoration ecologist with the Nature Conservancy.
This construction project will restore 16 acres of wetlands and 2,000 feet of shoreline within the Sandusky Bay. It’s a fraction of the 11,000 linear feet of shoreline the Nature Conservancy is working to restore altogether.
“The Sandusky Bay is one of the largest freshwater estuaries in Lake Erie,” Decker said.
Its shallow, warm water provides a valuable habitat for fish and migratory birds. But it’s often murky and prone to algal blooms.
With funding from H2Ohio and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Nature Conservancy is aiming to remedy that.
A changing bay
“Before the 1800s, if you looked out at the bay, it was a mosaic of different kinds of vegetation,” Decker said. “It ranged from wild rice fields to bottomland forests.”
But European settlers changed the landscape drastically, draining natural wetlands to create farmland and building cities along the coast.
With less native vegetation, the shoreline started eroding. In the Pickerel Creek Wildlife Area, Decker says it’s been pushed back by almost 100 feet in just the past few years.
“If you look over to the right, you can see roots of the trees hanging out,” she said. “That's where all the sediment has been lost over time.”
To combat this, more and more coastal communities across the Great Lakes have put in concrete barriers and large rock dikes. But as waves slam into them over and over again, Decker says they churn up sediment from the bottom of the lake.
“It makes the water cloudy and turbid and plants can't grow in that cloudy water,” she said. “It's kind of this vicious cycle.”
So the Nature Conservancy is trying a different approach.
An innovative solution
Instead of armoring the shore in concrete, they’re building long, natural barriers a few hundred feet into the water to weaken the waves before they hit the shore.
“We're using rock, but much smaller rock than on our dikes, with gentle slopes that will attenuate that wave action as it comes along the shore and help create quiet waters behind it so we can get some vegetation established,” Decker explained.
That vegetation will do two things: it’ll help slow erosion and it’ll soak up nutrients like phosphorus.
That’s important, because this restoration project isn’t just about improving a small section of shoreline. It’s about cleaning up Lake Erie’s water and reducing toxic algal blooms.
“Our goal is to significantly reduce the phosphorus flow into the bay, and then of course from the bay into the lake,” said Mary Mertz, director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which owns this property and is helping fund the shoreline restoration.
It goes hand in hand with the department’s other water quality efforts, like curbing nutrient runoff from farm fields.
“When we reduce that phosphorus flow, or if we reduce it significantly, our expectation is we will have a cleaner, more beautiful bay,” Mertz said.
The project’s benefits
A cleaner bay means more wildlife can call the area home.
Jim Brown grew up just a few miles from this area, and now works with the ODNR as the Assistant Wildlife Management Supervisor for the Pickerel Creek Wildlife Area.
Since the Nature Conservancy first started restoring the shoreline in the Sandusky Bay, he says he’s seen everything from river otters to sandhill cranes.
“We have a quite a few [eagles] up here,” he said, “So many so that sometimes you have to be looking above you for fish falling out of the sky.”
And cleaner water has benefits for locals and visitors, too.
“People around here depend on our fisheries for commercial fishing, for sustenance fishing, for recreation, and so it really is a benefit to the community,” Decker said.
She hopes more communities consider similar solutions.
“We don't see anything like this on the Great Lakes at this point and we hope that it influences the way we think about our shoreline in the future.”
The shoreline restoration projects will take a few more years to complete: Decker hopes eventually, Ohioans will see a more beautiful and healthier shoreline.
