Lake Winnipeg Eutrophication
Eutrophication is the enrichment of a water body with nutrients and minerals. It leads to the overgrowth of algae, which depletes oxygen levels suffocating other living organisms in a water body, including fish. The eutrophication in Lake Winnipeg can be attributed to various activities including the municipal sewage from Winnipeg’s sewage treatment plants, the loss of key wetland areas, the deteriorating status of the Netley-Libau marsh, excessive of agricultural fertilizers, tile drainage into the red river valley from farmlands, the lake’s internal phosphorous loading, climate change, and the failure of Manitoba Hydro to do more to fix this eutrophication.
If I had the magical power to solve one of these causes of the eutrophication in Lake Winnipeg, I would choose to address the issue of climate change. Besides climate change, the only other problem I believe to be natural is the challenge of the lake’s internal phosphorous loading. However, artificial intervention through ecological engineering can be used to minimize the amount of internal phosphorous loading at the lake through such approaches as planting macrophytes and stocking more fish. Therefore solving the climate issue would give scientists, ecologists, and other stakeholders enough room to work on fixing all the other human-made contributors of eutrophication in the lake. It is also worth noting that most of these risk factors, such as the draining of the wetlands and Netley-Libau marsh, were undertaken to solve the climatic effects of flooding.