Northwest Ohio’s landscape is getting a facelift in some areas now as part of ongoing efforts to improve western Lake Erie water quality.
The latest is the Lucas County Engineer’s Office’s recent completion in Monclova Township of the Morrison Ditch Restoration Project, which created a two-stage ditch designed to capture more algae-feeding nutrients and reduce the risk of flooding.
What’s a two-stage ditch?
Drive by one and the answer might not be readily apparent, but it’s becoming one of the more talked-about management tools.
Unlike a conventional ditch, in which water flows straight down, a two-stage ditch — often called a “ditch-within-a-ditch” — has land serving as benches within a ditch. Much of the runoff is filtered by soil and plants along those benches before it flows to the bottom.
The two-stage channel along Morrison Ditch is only 1,900 feet long, or bit more than one-third of a mile.
But Lucas County Engineer Mike Pniewski said it is expected to keep an estimated 83 pounds of nitrogen, 32 pounds of phosphorus, and 18 tons of sediment out of Swan Creek, a Lake Erie tributary, each year.
Nitrogen and phosphorus are two of the most common farm fertilizers, and their runoff grows much of the lake’s algae.
The plant uptake keeps those nutrients sequestered until the ditches are mowed, typically in the fall.
“Essentially, you’re harvesting the nutrients,” Mr. Pniewski said. “Personally, I think it’s one of the more effective BMPs [best management practices] we could implement.”
This latest project is only the fourth of its kind in Lucas County. Two-stage ditches were built along portions of Ten Mile Creek and Smith Ditch in Sylvania Township in 2020, followed by part of Brennan Ditch in Spencer Township in 2021.
Like a lot of landscape improvements, the biggest obstacle is money.
This project is another one that happened because of federal money made available to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, created in 2009 by former President Barack Obama to help improve the lakes and their tributaries.
The county received $113,000 of restoration initiative, money to put toward the $363,000 construction cost, the rest of which was obtained through the Lucas County Stormwater Utility, Mr. Pniewski said.
Contracts are to be awarded Jan. 25 for two more projects, one for portions of the Zink-Heldman Ditch in Springfield Township and the Van Fleet Ditch in Monclova Township. Construction is expected to be completed in late summer, the county engineer said.
Lucas County Commissioner Gary L. Byers said he and other board members are pleased that money from the local stormwater utility can be used to obtain restoration initiative funds through the Ohio EPA.
“The Lucas County commissioners support the investment of restoring and maintaining our watercourses to ensure the safety and prosperity of our community for years to come,” Mr. Byers said.
Jennifer Tank, one of the leading researchers behind two-stage ditches’ development, said they are meant to complement other agricultural efforts, such as cover crops, conservation management, and tile drain management.
The western Lake Erie region needs “a conceptual reframing of agricultural drainage and its role in conservation and water quality improvement,” said Ms. Tank, the University of Notre Dame’s Galla professor of ecology of streams and rivers.
A two-stage ditch “maintains drainage while also adding resilience to storms, which will be more common in the future,” she said, a reference to climate-change impacts documented and projected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Studies in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan have found two-stage ditches easy to maintain and “relatively self-sustaining,” while reducing localized phosphorus concentrations by as much as 53 percent and turbidity by as much as 82 percent, according to Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.
First Published January 16, 2022, 9:11 p.m.
