Authors:

Race Ethan Medema

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About Paper:

The Midwestern United States is home to thousands of lakes and freshwater reservoirs crucial to their surrounding communities' drinking water, irrigation, and recreation. Blue-green algae is exceedingly common in these freshwater bodies and plays a key role in dissolved oxygen content, but population blooms during summer months risk algae concentrations reaching toxic levels. The NASA Remote Sensing of Water Quality Project (RSWQ) aims to develop a prediction model for these Harmful Algae Blooms (HABs) by linking satellite imaging to water and environmental conditions that correspond to toxic blooms. This study uses concentrations of Chlorophyll-a and Pheophytin (Chl-a & Pheo,) two molecules used in algae photosynthesis, as indicators of blue-green algae population trends in Lake Shafer, IN, across the summers of 2023 and 2024. Water samples were periodically taken across 14 locations on Lake Shafer, which were extracted through 0.7 ?m vacuum filtration for Chl-a & Pheo. Field-collected data will be overlaid onto satellite imaging as an effective trend- finding method used in the future prediction model. This study covers only a single variable and water body within the much larger RSWQ project. It paints an important image of the effectiveness of field sampling and provides a snapshot of how a predictive model could function. Keywords: Water Quality; Water Management; Algae; Harmful Algae Blooms (HABs)

Source:

Purdue University / 2024

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Co-authors:

Race Ethan Medema