Beyond nutrients: metacoupled multi-shock drivers of Lake Erie HAB extremes
Severe harmful algal blooms keep returning to western Lake Erie despite decades of phosphorus reduction, which points to drivers beyond nutrient loading. This project organizes drivers with the metacoupling framework: in-lake processes (intracoupling), nutrient transport from the Maumee River watershed (pericoupling), and distant climate oscillations and global fertilizer markets (telecoupling). It quantifies how much the distant drivers add to explaining cyanobacteria dynamics, builds a physics-guided ensemble machine learning model that forecasts weekly cyanobacteria concentrations at monitoring stations across the western basin, and uses scenario analysis to find the climate and market conditions that amplify bloom severity.