Ohio Lake Erie Buffer Initiative- Final Report
  Challenges and Missed Opportunities

Though the project was highly successful, not everything the buffer team set out to accomplish was achieved within the time frame of the protection fund grant. Some items proved not feasible to do with the buffer teams resources and time available. In some instances the team encountered obstacles or institutional challenges, which required perseverance and creativity for team members to resolve. These items include:

1. A strength of the buffer team was that it began as a ground up initiative by some enthusiastic middle and lower level agency employees. However, as a result it was sometimes more of a priority of this level than it was of upper level leadership. Team members and the team leader served as volunteers or as a collaterally assigned duty, and despite their best intentions, priorities and the workload of their agencies sometimes pulled them in different directions or slowed progress.
   
   Changing agency priorities and continuity of team members affected the team. Part way through the effort some of the initial team members were assigned to different duties by their agencies or moved on and took new positions.
2. There was overall more team and county office involvement by those in the Western part of the watershed than in the Eastern part. To encourage participation, the team held some team meetings in the Eastern end of the watershed. This proved to be inconvenient for the majority of the group as most of the active members were from the Western part of the watershed, and did not materially increase Eastern participation.
   
   The Eastern portion of the watershed is also highly urban and the cost share incentive programs and delivery infrastructure were better developed and heavily targeted to the agricultural regions of the State. Since the Eastern area is more urbanized, and less intensively agricultural, there is a perception among residents, and some agency staff, that buffers are not needed. In addition, the higher land values in the urban areas make voluntary participation in the long-term agricultural contracts via the cost share programs undesirable. Additional work is needed to overcome these obstacles and to develop programs that are more effective in urban regions. Municipal programs, regulations and/or legislative initiatives maybe needed more in this part of the State. More work is needed on a program targeted towards the urban and suburban areas.
3. The team identified one objective of working with golf course owners. Buffers on golf courses would seem to have high potential for success…both in reducing maintenance costs via mowing for course owners, in beautification, and in high potential benefits for water quality since courses often locate adjacent to streams and are users of fertilizers/chemicals.
   
   The team was working with one course to nurture native warm season grasses. The project was well under way to fruition when the course groundskeeper left, and the new management promptly mowed off all the buffers. Challenges identified in talking with golf course people are the understanding of the need, development of the management skill, and overcoming the perception of the public that a good course is “tidily groomed”…i.e. the players and adjoining landowners don’t like to see things that ”look like weeds”. More work is needed in this area.
4. While buffers have been shown to be highly effective single practices when studied as a single site-specific practice in a research situation, measuring and monitoring or quantifying of water quality improvements due to buffers in a landscape has proved to be extremely difficult and expensive. Year to year climate fluctuations, variability of storm events, the scattered nature of landowner installations, influence of other pollutants, all combine to make it difficult to capture solely the buffer effect. If one believes the plot research or the effects monitored in other watersheds such as Bear Creek Iowa, the need to measure this is not so important. Nevertheless, resource managers seem to have an innate need for this data.
5. One means used to track progress was maintaining a summary of enrollment of all types of buffer acres. The team leader attempted to do this annually. Since buffers are installed under a variety of different incentive programs, there is no one central source of data for all accomplishments. To obtain these figures the team leader aggregated several data bases from several different agencies.
   
   In addition the data base for the USDA FSA CRP/CREP program, the main source of buffer incentives funding, often has a lag time as much as a year between the time the buffer is installed and the time the national data base gets updated to reflect that accomplishment. Thus, there is a delay in being able to timely report current year accomplishments.
6. Finally, the last challenged faced is the need for patience. Watersheds are natural systems that evolve over time. Buffers take time to fully mature. Research work done in the Bear Creek Watershed in Iowa shows while buffers immediately start providing benefits, that improvements due to buffer installation sometimes may not be fully realized until as much as 10-15 years after initial establishment.
   
   
                        Buffer System in Iowa State University's
                        Bear Creek Watershed Research Project
   
   Yet when algae blooms recently redeveloped in Lake Erie, articles began to appear in the popular press to the affect that “maybe the CREP program isn’t working.” When measuring the success of CREP or the buffer program, it is important to remember that this effort needs to be a long- term project and that the need for full treatment is to eventually treat all the streams and/or drainage courses in the watershed. Just as the natural buffers were lost, one by one, over time, they will be restored one by one over time. The improvements will come gradually and accumulate not only as more and more buffers are installed, but also as they develop and mature.
   
   The true measure of success should not be what is in the water today, but are the installation and maintenance trends continuing to point upward, and what is the long-term health of the biological system.

Ohio Lake Erie Buffer Initiative FINAL REPORT- March 2004

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