Surveying the Landscape

Northwestern Ohio’s landscape is marked mostly by agriculture, with farms of all sizes stretching across the Maumee River watershed and beyond.

A collaborative project, led by Ohio State University, is examining the connection between people’s perception of the health of Lake Erie and the Maumee River watershed, the actual state of these ecosystems, and how both are likely to shift under future influences like climate change. The overall project is funded by a National Science Foundation program aimed at examining the connection between human and natural systems – how humans influence an ecosystem, and how changes in that ecosystem in turn affect humans’ perception of and future actions towards it.