Major Goals and Objectives

Three major research questions that we aim to address are:

• Are the secondary environmental impacts of the existing nutrient loss management BMPs significant so that they pose substantial challenges in their sustainability?
• How could redesign the existing technologies/practices to minimize these challenges?
• How can we offer techno economically viable solutions to boost the technology adoption of the existing nutrient loss management strategies in the larger scale?

Lake Michigan, a significant global freshwater resource, has been constantly afflicted by nutrient pollution leading to eutrophication due to draining of excess nutrients from the most intensively managed agricultural landscapes in the Midwest. Many BMPs have been in practice in the urban and agricultural watersheds and are effective in reducing nutrient loss via surface runoff, yet lake Michigan’s nutrient concentrations and HABs are still serious problems. Recent research suggests that the existing BMPs render secondary environmental impacts which could undermine their functions of nutrient loss reduction and challenge their sustainability. For example, multiple BMPs that have been tremendously effective in controlling surface runoff and the subsequent associated nutrient loss, have dramatically altered the nutrient loss pathways from surface to sub-surface drainage whose subsequent negative impacts are profound on the Great Lakes region. Agricultural and stormwater BMPs such as conservation tillage, strip tillage, riparian buffers, bioretention cells, woodchip mulching etc. have been particularly effective in sediment and nutrient loss reduction from surface runoff in field scale, while inadequate to override nutrient export from the subsurface drainage when observed in the watershed scale. In that regard, researchers have identified woodchip based BMPs as important green infrastructures to overcome these challenges and keep pace with the rising ecological impacts of urbanization and agricultural practices.