Funding Secured for University of Michigan’s Lake Erie Project

Senators Debbie Stabenow, vice chair of the Great Lakes Task Force, and Carl Levin, chair of the Great Lakes Task Force, announced yesterday a $177,706 grant for the University of Michigan’s Cooperative Institute for Limnology and Ecosystems Research through the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

This support, which comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Oceanic & Atmospheric Research, will help researchers develop models to predict and manage algal blooms and prevent water contamination in Lake Erie.

“The Great Lakes are critical to Michigan’s economy and our way of life,” said Stabenow. “This grant will help University of Michigan researchers better understand how to prevent future algal blooms like the bloom in Lake Erie that recently contaminated drinking water in Southeast Michigan.”

“This is a battle we’ve been fighting since I helped pass the first local phosphorus restrictions on the Detroit City Council,” Levin said. “As this summer’s algae bloom on Lake Erie demonstrates, we still need to research what causes these problems and how to combat them, and this research grant will help provide the answers we need.”

The Western Lake Erie Phosphorus Concentrations to Mitigate Harmful and Nuisance Algal Blooms project will develop models to better predict algal blooms by studying the relationship between phosphorous contamination and other variables.