One buoy was placed near Camp Merz in Mayville while the other was placed around Hadley Bay. The project, organized by scientists from Bowling Green State University in cooperation with the Chautauqua Lake Partnership, will provide real-time monitoring every few hours of phosphorus levels.

The data will be collected by Bowling Green officials and will help locate exactly where the bulk of the phosphorus in Chautauqua Lake is coming from.

According to the 2012 Total Minimum Daily Load for Phosphorus in Chautauqua Lake, it was estimated that 80,828.7 pounds of phosphorus were entering the lake each year. The largest sources were estimated to be groundwater and internal loading in both basins.

“The goal is to get these in the water today,” said Dr. George Bullerjahn, a professor in the department of biological sciences at Bowling Green.

“The idea is that being a pilot for the fall, put them in today and come back in a couple of weeks. We’ll download data and see if they match up with grab samples we will be taking at the same time. Then we’ll probably come back in a month from now and pull them.”

Bullerjahn said he wanted to get the sensors in the water before the summer when more people are in and around the lake.

“There might be a big septic field going on,” he said. “It’s a signal we might capture when Memorial Day hits. That’s a question I’d like answered. There’s a legacy load in the sediments, but is there a continuous human element that arises as people show up for the summer?”

While there are many ways phosphorus makes its way into Chautauqua Lake, the work the Bowling Green scientists are undertaking will identify sources that can’t be seen with the naked eye.

“It’s actually measuring quite a few things around phosphorus,” said JoDee Johnson, CLP secretary, recently. “Phosphorus is the main nutrient basically for weeds and for blue-green algae. So if you can determine where you have hot spots, then you can focus on treating those areas first and develop a plan around that. With everyone having limited money right now, the places that are the worst are where we should be focusing. It’s working smarter, not harder, in trying to figure out where these hot spots are and develop solutions and strategies around that. It’s related to everything we’re doing in the lake and everything we potentially could do in the future.”

The buoy pictured from the boat shortly before it was deployed. A second buoy was placed near Hadley Bay. Photo by JoDee Johnson

Following the pilot, the goal is to get more buoys in the lake by late April or early May of next year.

Dr. Jim Cirbus, CLP president, said he hopes the group is able to receive enough funding to obtain six to eight more buoys for a spring deployment. Additional funding is currently being sought for the expanded project.

“This has been an idea we’ve had for a number of years,” Cirbus said of studying phosphorus levels. “We’ve had the idea to try and find these hot spots.”

Cirbus said the collaboration with Bowling Green has been beneficial.

“They’ve been great to work with,” he said. “They are the international gurus on this stuff. They’re brilliant, and we had the opportunity to take advantage of this partnership.”

Bowling Green is one of 11 organizations collaborating on national research of toxic algal blooms that the university’s Lake Erie Center for Fresh Waters and Human Health, founded with a $5.2 million federal grant, is researching harmful algal blooms that pose a threat to the health of humans and wildlife.

“These guys all have their doctorate and are specialists in their field,” Johnson said. “Bowling Green is studying Lake Erie, and they’ve added Chautauqua Lake onto that. They’re the only one of the 11 universities that are actually studying fresh water. The rest are all studying estuaries or the ocean. It’s huge for Chautauqua Lake to have them look at this. That’s in part due to their work that they’re doing on Lake Erie. I think it’s great. I think it’s really important having a university in that group invested in this. We’ve got a lot of expertise in the lake, but I’m not sure we have that expertise in blue-green algae.”