The April issue of the Thames River PRC is now available!

Volume 3 April, 2020

PRC Update

Spotlight on our people

New Co-Chair: Clare Latimer

Mary Clare Latimer, who is the new Thames River Phosphorus Reduction Collaborative (PRC) steering committee co-chair representing Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative (GLSLCI), has always been a champion of the environment. So when the Chatham-Kent (C-K) municipal councillor was asked to step into the role, she was happy to say yes.

“Chatham-Kent is situated on a floodplain, surrounded by water, so we’re on the front lines of Lake Erie water issues,” she says, pointing out that her area accounts for 20 per cent or 4,800 kilometres of the municipal drains in Ontario.

Read more about Clare here .

Salford installation

It was a cold day in mid-February, but the crew from the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority and Bluewater Pipe were determined to install phosphorus interception and extraction technology at the Salford site.

Basically, the tower is hooked into the field's tile drainage system. Water is diverted through a porous bag of combined slag (byproducts from steel production) and stone where it is hoped that the phosphorus will bind to the material in the filter.

The advantage of this technology is that it doesn't mind the cold and will work in both summer and winter.

Watch for data coming from the demonstration sites after the spring runoff.

A list of all the demonstration sites is here .

IJC gets recommendations to better co-ordinate manure management

The International Joint Commission has received recommendations from the Great Lakes Water Quality Board urging Canadian and U.S. jurisdictions abutting the Great Lakes to co-ordinate regulations, policies and practices around managing manure from farms.

Manure is a great fertilizer for crops, but too much of a good thing can wind up producing phosphorus in surface and ground waters. This, in turn, encourages algal growth in the Great Lakes.

Lots of good advice in the full report here .

Or, if you want to see the recommendations at a glance, here's the infographic.

Friends of Thames River PRC

Catherine Febria

Catherine Febria is passionate about connecting land and water, people and nature, and her current research work in freshwater restoration shows it.

Febria is an assistant professor and the Canada Research Chair in Freshwater Restoration Ecology at the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER). There she runs the Healthy Headwaters Lab and team (www.HealthyHeadwatersLab.ca).

GLIER’s mission is “to foster innovation through interdisciplinary research, education and community engagement to advance the understanding of complex environmental problems threatening large lakes and their watersheds”