The environmental benefits that arise from the conversion of over 750 acres of farmland to coastal marsh wetlands are significant. Farmland is traditionally the largest contributor to phosphorous loading, so the park made a big first step in removing 750 acres of fertilized farmland from the Lake Erie basin. It also serves to remove phosphorous from the upstream drainage areas—still predominately rural residential farmland—by capturing, storing, and treating upstream runoff before discharging to the lake. “According to the scientific literature, one acre of restored Lake Erie coastal wetland can remove 13 pounds of phosphorus from the water per year,” says Tim Schetter, Ph.D., Director of Natural Resources for Metroparks Toledo. With hundreds of acres of marshlands that can be subjected to varying flood volumes, the park plays a huge role in providing flood storage capacity and improving water quality within the watershed, all of which should contribute to lessen the reoccurrence of harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie.

Success Is In The Design Details

The technical design of the park required patience from the SmithGroup design team as well as the owner and regulatory stakeholders. Creating a 750-acre park that wouldn’t overwhelm a casual park visitor needed a delicate balance between aesthetic and technical design—specifically regarding the creation of dikes to encompass the new wetland cells.

Review of the existing site-drainage patterns and conditions resulted in a three-cell geometric layout. The northern cell—encompassing approximately 450 acres—is the largest and accepts runoff from the surrounding rural residential areas by intercepting drainage channels and pumping upstream runoff into the diked cell. The detailed pump outlet from the park to the lake has to provide for varying flow capacities and fish passage between the lake and the wetlands, but only for the preferred species, not invasive or nuisance fish. The other two cells are smaller—roughly 84 and 56 acres respectively—and are the focus of most of the recreational components within the park.

The project included almost 700,000 cubic yards of earthwork, which required numerous iterations to balance volumes within the overall site and accommodate localized “phasing” limits in each cell to limit the distances that equipment would have to haul dirt.