Developing Clean Ideas
Because HABRI researchers focus on questions they can address in two years or less, findings quickly make their way to agency personnel and managers who can apply them to their work.
In the summer of 2014, toxin-producing algae led to the city of Toledo shutting off drinking water for half a million residents. Once the immediate crisis was over, state agencies and Ohio universities came together to address the critical gaps in knowledge about tracking and dealing with harmful algal blooms. With funding from the Ohio Department of Higher Education, the Harmful Algal Bloom Research Initiative (HABRI) was born in 2015.