TIFFIN — On the second floor of Heidelberg University’s Gillmor Science Hall is a laboratory that produces some of the most important clues for Great Lakes scientists to predict outbreaks of toxic algae.

Heidelberg’s National Center for Water Quality Research is not alone in doing that kind of scientific detective work. But it has been collecting data on phosphorus releases longer than any other group in the Great Lakes region, accumulating information about Lake Erie tributaries that helps researchers better understand how farm fertilizers and other nutrients get into water.

Rick Stumpf, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oceanographer in Maryland who leads a team of scientists that makes annual forecasts for western Lake Erie, said his agency relies a lot on Heidelberg’s data. It uses it in tandem with images sent back to Earth by NASA satellites.

Heidelberg’s work helps Great Lakes scientists “understand how phosphorus loads have changed, especially the changes in dissolved [reactive] phosphorus, which is more available to the cyanobacteria,” Mr. Stumpf said.

“This improves our ability to model and predict the blooms and ultimately to reduce them,” he said.

Tim Davis, a research scientist at NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, agreed.

“Without those data, NOAA would not be able to produce that important product,” Mr. Davis said of weekly algae forecasts for Lake Erie.

Starting this week, NOAA will issue a series of Lake Erie Harmful Algal Bloom bulletins until July 7, when its final seasonal forecast for Lake Erie will be released at Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory.

The weekly bulletins are highly subject to change, based on changing weather conditions over the next several weeks. But water-plant operators and public officials clamored for earlier warnings after algae overwhelmed Toledo’s Collins Park water treatment plant in 2014, making city-produced water unsafe to drink or touch for the system’s nearly 500,000 customers the first weekend of August that year.

By the time the July summary is made, forecasts will become much firmer. Those midsummer warnings began six years ago.

Laura Johnson, a Heidelberg researcher named in February as the new director of the university’s National Center for Water Quality Research, said the preliminary outlook is for an average bloom this summer.

Although the Heidelberg lab is focused primarily on Lake Erie, the trends it identifies have been used for years to help identify similar land-use problems throughout the Great Lakes region. Western Lake Erie is often seen as a sentinel for water quality because it is the warmest, shallowest — and, thus, most biologically dynamic — part of the Great Lakes.

Created in 1969 as the River Laboratory by David Baker, now a retired Heidelberg biology professor, Heidelberg’s National Center for Water Quality Research was renamed the Water Quality Laboratory in 1974. It got its current name following passage of a U.S. House of Representatives resolution in 2004.

Expanded role

In addition to nutrients, the center has been tracking the controversial herbicide atrazine for years. In 1980, it began tracking pesticides. In 1996, it broadened its reach to include sampling along three Ohio River tributaries.

Today, monitoring is done along 18 rivers and streams, mostly in Ohio, but also the River Raisin in southeastern Michigan’s Monroe County.

“The lab is older than the Clean Water Act,” Ms. Johnson said as she began a tour of the facility.

The 1972 Clean Water Act ushered in the modern era of sewage treatment, forcing billions to be invested in lowering the amount of algae-forming nutrients from sewage-treatment plants and other “point” sources that had fouled water in previous generations. The law did not address agriculture and other “non-point” sources. Today, they are by far the biggest source of algae-producing phosphorus and nitrogen.

Heidelberg’s National Center for Water Quality Research has only an 11-person staff. Six hold PhDs. A turning point was when it began using automated equipment in 1974, Ms. Johnson said.

She said there are two important things many people don’t know about the lab:

First, Mr. Baker had the foresight to start collecting data on both dissolved reactive phosphorus and total phosphorus in the early days. Scientists have learned in recent years that dissolved reactive phosphorus is more important because, pound for pound, it produces a lot more algae.

Second, the lab, unlike some facilities, continued to monitor rivers and streams in the mid-1990s, when zebra mussels made Lake Erie’s water clearer than it’d been in decades. Conditions have since deteriorated, but there aren’t the data gaps there could have been.

It draws upon the experience of Ellen Ewing, the lab’s manager, who has been with the facility for 40 years. Jack Kramer, lab manager emeritus, has been with it 48 years.

The lab struggles at times to cobble together enough grant money for its $970,000 annual budget, which comes from about two dozen sources. About $650,000 of it is used for sampling.

“That’s why we prioritize,” Ms. Ewing said.

But any mention of the lab invariably comes back to its founder, Mr. Baker. Jeff Reutter, retired Ohio Sea Grant and OSU Stone Lab director, said Mr. Baker’s contributions are legendary.

“You can’t talk about what Heidelberg does, and has done, without talking about its people,” Mr. Reutter said.

He likewise gave big nods to Mr. Baker’s successors, Peter Richards, Ken Krieger, and, now, Ms. Johnson. Heidelberg’s sampling regime calls for samples to be collected three times a day, every day.

“It is often referred to by scientists in our region as the ‘Heidelberg Protocol,’ and is considered the gold standard of sampling programs or the Cadillac version,” Mr. Reutter said.

Heidelberg’s data rely on much less estimating and interpolation, he said. It is the only set of data that “allows us to determine which actions on the landscape impacted the changes in [nutrient] loads we are observing,” Mr. Reutter said.

Mr. Reutter said he first met Mr. Baker as a college freshman in 1968, when he took Mr. Baker’s introductory biology class. The time he spent in Mr. Baker’s fledgling laboratory set the course for his future career and marriage to his future wife, he said.

“All of the major modelers on the Great Lakes use Dave’s data and/​or his results and interpretations,” Mr. Reutter said.

Mr. Reutter called them “the most, or one of the most, valuable data sets on nutrient loading in the world.”

Lake Erie’s primary form of toxic algae since 1995, microcystis, has been on the rise globally the past 20 years. It is believed to be 3.5 billion years old, making it one of the oldest living things on Earth, something that co-existed with dinosaurs.

Understanding microcystis is more important now, though, because its growth is believed to have been accelerated by climate change and invasive species all over the world, from China’s Lake Taihu to Africa’s Lake Victoria, and from the Arctic Circle to the bottom of South America.

The Heidelberg lab, Mr. Reutter said, is “allowing the Great Lakes scientific community to be a leader in understanding the drivers for nutrient loading and harmful algal blooms — issues that have become global problems.”

Kudos from activists

The lab gets kudos from the activist community, too.

Kristy Meyer, managing director of natural resources for the Ohio Environmental Council, is a Heidelberg alumna who said the lab’s collection of data puts state officials in a better position to “make smarter choices about policies and water — and hopefully they do make smarter choices.”

Former Toledo City Councilman Frank Szollosi said the Heidelberg lab has helped him in his current role of tracking climate change issues for the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Office in Ann Arbor and the Lucas County Commission.

He said the increasing frequency of heavy rain in the spring has driven many of the changes Heidelberg has recorded.

“The observed changes are forecast to continue and perhaps intensify,” Mr. Szollosi said. “It’s critical that researchers at Heidelberg and elsewhere continue to elevate these climate impacts so that citizens, businesses, policymakers, and agriculture can appropriately factor these changes into their nutrient reduction strategies and practices.”

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.

First Published May 16, 2016, 4:00 a.m.