A Minnesota conservation group wants to focus on land protection and restoration near the St. Louis River as a part of a multi-state initiative known as the Greater Lakes Promise, an effort to improve water quality in the Great Lakes.
According to Carrie Jennings, the research and policy director at Freshwater, a nonprofit leading the initiative, water quality problems in many states have arisen from conventional agriculture.
While that’s a concern in Minnesota, it’s not as pressing to the Minnesota Land Trust, a conservation group whose focus is the St. Louis River watershed in the Duluth area. That group, one of the recipients of funding through the partnership, is more focused on how development affects the watershed, said Pat Collins, a conservation program manager at Minnesota Land Trust, which will receive $100,000 over the next five years to help its conservation efforts.
The other watersheds in the partnership are those of the Maumee River and Saginaw River, for which other conservation groups are working on projects.
The five-year partnership is being funded by the Great Lakes Protection Fund. Individual partner organizations will be given money every year to use in whatever way they need, whether it be getting rid of invasive species, maintaining lands or hiring staff, Jennings said.
The Minnesota Land Trust focuses on protection, restoration and engagement on issues of water and environment. For this group, restoration means putting habitat back on the path towards recovery, Collins said.
For example, in the St. Louis River Estuary the organization is working with tribal and local partners to restore habitats and clean up contaminated sediments from the development and industrialization around the river.
Restoration efforts are ongoing there through the Department of Natural Resources and with the help of federal funding through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.
Industrial pollution
The St. Louis River Estuary is 12,000 acres of habitat. It’s also the largest freshwater estuary in North America, according to the DNR, and the headwaters of the Great Lakes.
“The work that the Land Trust has done has been mostly aimed at trying to restore wetland and shoreline habitat that can be put back on a path towards a healthy, productive, really biologically important habitat,” Collins said.
The area had been heavily industrialized because of its port location, which led to waste discharges contaminating natural resources like surface water and sediment, soils and wildlife.
“The U.S. Steel plant and a number of other really heavy industry operations were in the Duluth-Superior area that resulted in contaminants just being dumped into the river and sinking into the sediment and remaining in the food chain,” he said. “We have those contaminants that have been identified.”
Collins said previous work has taken contaminants out of the river to restore the health of the food chain that relies on clean water. As a part of the Greater Lakes Promise, the Minnesota Land Trust will identify sources of water runoff and find ways to help landowners protect the waterways connected to their land.
Another focus of the Land Trust will be to find out more about the harmful algal blooms occurring in the Great Lakes, which in other Great Lake states seem to occur because of nutrient-enriched runoff from agricultural practices. But there’s uncertainty about the root cause for the algal blooms in Lake Superior, which is not in an agriculture-heavy area, Jennings said.
Ava Kian
Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.
