Cleveland Water Alliance Creates Digitally Connected Watershed to Address Threats to Lake Erie

On August 2, 2014, the residents of Toledo, Ohio, woke to urgent messages from local officials warning them not to ingest or bathe in their tap water. A toxic algal bloom in Lake Erie had infiltrated several drinking water treatment plants, causing half a million people to lose access to water for almost three days. Now known as the Toledo Water Crisis, the situation puts a spotlight on water infrastructure near the Great Lakes, and sparked conversations about how water-related disasters impact public and environmental health.

Great Lakes watersheds are wide-reaching, with the Lake Erie watershed alone helping to sustain approximately 12 million people, but disasters can impact any watershed, regardless of size.

Watersheds are land areas that channel rainfall into a variety of aquatic habitats—lakes, rivers, streams, and wetlands. Like the Toledo Water Crisis, we are seeing increased threats to our watersheds such as E-Coli outbreaks, fish kills, algae blooms and chemical and oil spills can disrupt and damage ecosystems.

In Cleveland, Ohio, one nonprofit organization is pioneering a solution, which may one day serve as a blueprint for water advocacy organizations in the Great Lakes and beyond. Cleveland Water Alliance (CWA), along with dozens of regional partner organizations, has deployed more than 200 sensors to water sources throughout the region to create the most digitally connected watershed in the world.

A citizen scientist on the shores of a riverbank. Photo credit: Cleveland Metroparks

These solar-powered sensors are part of CWA’s Smart Lake Erie Watershed Initiative. The sensors collect information like water temperature, pH, conductivity, and turbidity, and transmit the data in real time to government agencies, researchers, water advocacy groups, nonprofits, and the general public.

CWA Program Manager Max Herzog explains that, with the help of this data, officials can better respond to abnormalities and try to prevent disasters like the Toledo Water Crisis before they occur. To this end, CWA has helped implement at least one sensor per county along the Ohio Lake Erie coastline, as well as at most drinking water treatment plants and beaches between Toledo and Cleveland.

“Data is never a solution on its own, but it informs all the decision-making and management that actually changes things on the ground,” Herzog says. “The data helps folks understand what the real challenges are … and evaluate the impact of different efforts to address them.”

Data from stationary sensors are supplemented by volunteers with the Lake Erie Volunteer Science Network (LEVSN), a collective founded by CWA in 2020 as a connection point for local water advocacy groups to share knowledge, resources, and projects. In 2022, LEVSN boasted more than 1,000 volunteers across 16 partner organizations. Herzog says, for the most part, volunteers are local individuals with a passion for water conservation, who may or may not have formal training in chemistry or science.

Prior to joining LEVSN, many of the partner organizations were making the most of small budgets, often using low-cost basic field chemistry sets and keeping track of data in Excel spreadsheets, where it wasn’t accessible to other organizations or decision makers. With the help of CWA, the network’s first task was improving their technology.

“We’ve equipped these local groups partner organizations with industry standard technology that empowers them to collect and share credible water data,” says Herzog. “The data helps advance their mission of preserving and improving the quality of their local water resources and those of the Lake Erie basin.”

A citizen scientist collects a water sample. Photo credit: Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper

With funding from a collective of community foundations called the Great Lakes One Water (GLOW) Partnership, CWA provided each LEVSN partner organization with high-level industry standard sensors and access to a cloud-based storage and analysis software. Armed with those tools, these organizations can expand the scope of their projects, develop local water conservation strategies, advocate for policy changes, and much more.

“We’re now able to have them analyze the data in a consistent way and contribute to a shared story not just about their own local watershed—which is certainly a critical part of the work—but also about the health of Lake Erie watersheds in general,” says Herzog.

Data aside, he adds, just having citizen scientists who are engaged and knowledgeable about their local water resources can help prevent crises. While monitoring their local water sources, LEVSN volunteers take note of anything unusual, which has allowed them to prevent concerning situations on more than one occasion. For example, these citizen scientists have helped orchestrate proper stormwater management at local construction sites, identified potential illicit discharges from manufacturers, and even prevented a possible E-Coli outbreak by facilitating the clean-up of feces from misplaced livestock near a LEVSN-monitored culvert.

“The more folks we have out there monitoring and putting eyes on the water, the better,” says Herzog. “Just having someone out there to say, ‘Something doesn’t seem right here’ and knowing who to call can really make a huge difference.”

Moving forward, the possibilities for future applications of this technology are as vast as the watershed itself. Currently, CWA is working with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to provide low-cost sensors to constructed wetlands as part of the state’s H2Ohio project. Meanwhile, LEVSN is hoping to expand their data to include critical information about nutrients, macroinvertebrates, and habitats that will help paint a fuller picture of the health of Lake Erie watersheds.

“We really feel like we’ve done a lot, but we’re just scratching the surface in terms of the depth and breadth of the story these groups can tell and the kind of information they can produce,” Herzog says.

Visit ClevelandWaterAlliance.org for more information.