Abstract
Green Lake, located in central Wisconsin USA within a watershed with land use dominated by agriculture, is listed as impaired under Sect. 303(d) of the Clean Water Act. The primary tributary, Silver Creek, is also impaired because of high total phosphorus (TP) concentrations. Silver Creek flows through a shallow marsh before reaching the lake. Prior to 2006, the marsh was turbid and free of macrophytes. Efforts to restrict carp (Cyprinus carpio) in the marsh and reduce the primary upstream phosphorus point source, resulted in the marsh becoming a clear-water, macrophyte-dominated system.
The point source reduction and marsh phytoplankton-to-macrophyte shift reduced the export of TP and suspended sediment (SS). These measured reductions at the marsh outlet exceeded the documented reductions in the upstream point source suggesting that the shift to a macrophyte-dominated system drove part of the TP reductions. TP loads at the marsh outlet significantly decreased in all seasons; however, SS loads significantly decreased in all seasons except winter, suggesting the vegetation shift was an important driver for these reductions. During 2012–2017, the marsh served as an overall sink for TP and SS, retaining on average 1.59 kg/day and 0.95 MT/day, respectively. Overall, this study documents benefits of a multi-stakeholder, collaborative ecological effort to restore a marsh from a turbid system to a macrophyte-dominated system, which resulted in significant reductions in downstream TP and SS loading to a major inland lake. This effort may serve as a model for similar restorations in other watersheds with land use dominated by agriculture.
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Data Availability
All flow and water quality data collected by the U.S. Geological Survey and used to compute daily loads are available from the National Water Information System (USGS, 2022), Robertson et al. (2022), or Robertson and Kennedy (2021). The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
Funding was provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
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Sarah Fuller: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Validation; Visualization; Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing. Edward Boswell: Investigation; Visualization; Writing - review & editing. Anita Thompson: Conceptualization; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Writing - review & editing. Dale Robertson: Data curation; Formal analysis; Methodology; Visualization; Writing - review & editing.
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Fuller, S., Boswell, E.P., Thompson, A.M. et al. Water-Quality Improvement of an Agricultural Watershed Marsh After Macrophyte Establishment and Point-Source Reduction. Wetlands 42, 129 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-022-01649-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-022-01649-0