1. The State is in between setting goals for specific watersheds and agricultural practices and planning for the adaptive management phase of the diagram in Figure 1. The Panel recommends that the State of Michigan identify and commit the needed resources to sustain an independent scientific advisory panel to help guide and institutionalize adaptive management into the public and private sectors’ collaborative efforts to deliver financial and technical support to the agricultural and stormwater management communities.
2. The Panel recommends that the State of Michigan consider this recent report submitted to the International Joint Commission by the Great Lakes Science Advisory Board - Institutional Arrangements of Nutrient Adaptive Management Work Group. The report contains numerous recommendations to improve communication and collaboration among the multiple jurisdictions concerned with the WLEB and charts the way forward for adaptive management. The report’s key recommendations that apply to the WLEB include:
   1. Improve communication to link domestic and binational adaptive management processes.
   2. Institutionalize the Lake Erie Nutrient Adaptive Management Framework through dedicated funding and staffing.
   3. Address key research and data gaps.
   4. Explore lessons learned and best practices from other examples of adaptive management.

Local outreach, engagement, and program promotion efforts should include ongoing socio-behavioral monitoring and evaluation (including changes in social indicators of behavior, such as attitudes, perceived norms) and designs for future, more enhanced monitoring, as well as evaluation efforts to identify strategies that effectively expand the implementation of conservation behaviors. This includes clear goal and objective setting during the planning phase, implementation of multiple strategies, monitoring and evaluation, and periodic reassessment of outreach goals and objectives.

Scaling up voluntary use of agricultural conservation practices is fundamentally a behavior change challenge. The State of Michigan should increase the capacity of government agencies, local conservation districts, and other conservation partners to leverage social and behavioral sciences, expand use of the Agricultural Inventory process to document current practice adoption, and support locally-led producer and landowner engagement. Specific recommended actions include:

1. The State of Michigan should increase internal capacity, or hire a contractor, to review existing (particularly recent) social and behavioral science research related to the adoption of farming practices and landscape level changes, such as creating wetlands, including in similar settings such as the Maumee River watershed in Ohio.
2. Conservation practice adoption should be an integral part of the adaptive management program. Stakeholders, state and local agencies, and partner organizations should evaluate and discuss the scientific data associated with farming practice impacts on water quality and farm production, social perceptions of practice, and the options for water quality management in order to provide data-backed BMP recommendations to increase adoption of conservation practices.
3. The State of Michigan must increase agency and partner capacity to engage key stakeholders effectively, conduct and evaluate effective outreach strategies, and implement adaptive management. This includes training and support in communications, effective outreach, ongoing outreach evaluation, and monitoring of social indicators of behavior change. Further research is needed to identify successful engagement and outreach strategies within Michigan, including rigorous evaluation of the existing program and practice outreach efforts of state and local agencies and partner organizations.
4. The State of Michigan should expand on current efforts to support local “boots on the ground” agencies and organizations in outreach and engagement planning, coordination of existing programs and efforts between organizations, and increasing local capacity to lead practice promotion and sustained use by producers and landowners.

Support for peer-to-peer farmer networks is a demonstrated model for increasing use of conservation practices. Successful examples include:

1. Wisconsin’s producer-led watershed groups, which are supported through grants to locally-led groups of farmers with training and outreach support;
2. Practical Farmers of Iowa, a state-based organization that coordinates on-farm research on conservation and innovative practices;
3. National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Champions program, which provides outreach grants, communications training, and other ongoing support for farmer-led conservation outreach.

The State of Michigan should continue its investment in an expanded network of water quality monitoring stations beyond existing sites in the River Raisin and Maumee watersheds. Additional monitoring stations should include both points where rivers flow into the lake and outflows from major sub-basins and be expanded to include the Huron, Rouge, and Detroit rivers. Measurements should be expanded at all existing and future sampling locations to include both discharge and total phosphorus (TP), and soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP), nitrate, total Kjeldahl nitrogen, and ammonium. Suspended sediments and pathogens are also of interest. The sampling design should include targeted sample collection during storm events. The State of Michigan should prioritize maintenance of these stations over time to ensure a long-term water quality data set that can be used to inform adaptive management and other investment decisions by the state and partners. Reacting to these recommendations, Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) staff informed us that monitoring has been expanded in both coverage and measurements in the past few years. The Panel wishes to emphasize the importance of keeping up this expanded sampling for the long term to be able to identify trends, and to ascertain the efficacy of measures to reduce nutrient export from land to water.

The State of Michigan must take full advantage of the rich body of geospatial data being assembled for the Michigan portion of the Western Lake Erie Basin (WLEB) to support management decisions. The state should also access improved spatially explicit models such as the Soil & Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) that estimate nutrient and sediment loss.

Major gaps in our scientific understanding include:

1. Given the accumulating scientific evidence of the effect of nitrogen availability on bloom community composition, toxicity, and duration, the cost/benefit of single (phosphorus) versus dual (nitrogen and phosphorus) nutrient management should be considered;
2. The net effect of conservation tillage practices on phosphorus export to streams is uncertain in the WLEB; and
3. The relative importance of tile drainage vs. overland flow for phosphorus export from cropland is uncertain and needs to be understood to prioritize mitigation actions.

Funding for research to address these scientific uncertainties is likely to come from a combination of federal, state, and non-governmental sources, and is likely to be conducted primarily by academic researchers. The State of Michigan should encourage and support this research to the maximum extent possible.

Major gaps in our scientific understanding include:

1. The Panel supports the importance of the State of Michigan gaining access to data from federal agencies such as the Farm Service Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service to inform the adaptive management process. This includes current information about the extent and location of practice adoption, program participation, and other forms of action undertaken by land owners and managers. The Panel recommends the State of Michigan reach out to members of the Chesapeake Bay Program Partnership to learn first hand from their experiences and solutions to gaining access to practice implementation data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agencies.
2. Michigan’s Quality of Life agencies should serve in an agenda-setting and capacity-supporting role for local agencies and conservation partners best positioned to engage local farmers and other stakeholders. These partners include conservation districts, watershed organizations, local citizen groups, farmer-led organizations, and other conservation groups.
3. The Panel sees value in a higher level of collaboration between Michigan and Ohio under the Western Lake Erie Basin Collaborative Agreement process.