WATCH NOW: Smart Lake Erie Watershed: The World's Largest Digitally Connected Freshwater Body

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Cleveland Water Alliance is harnessing the economic power of our region’s greatest natural resource through the Smart Lake Erie Watershed.

CWA has built a telecommunications network that spans over 6,500 square miles of the Lake Erie region and is being used to test and trial new technologies from all over the world.

Ebie Holst: "We're working with partners to build out internet connectivity over the Lake Erie watershed, enabling deployment of sensors and internet of things devices, attracting this quickly growing industry to the region."

Leonard Kieseler: "By deploying all these buoys and communication lasts on land and offshore is unique, never been before and it just allows all these smart centering and monitoring providers to finally test it in a very biodiverse fragile ecosystem that is just so important to the state of Ohio specifically the industrial region here in Cleveland."

Bryan Stubbs: "Why does this matter? Initially we've built this out to trial really cool interesting technologies in terms of our testbed but as we've been building this out it turned out this data is massively useful to a variety of partners including public health agencies, things like E. coli, early warning systems, harmful algal bloom, early warning systems, hypoxia, early warning systems, oil and chemical response systems."

Dorothy Baunach: "The ability to test your product that is sensing some chemical or contaminant and have visibility to those tests in real time through our network, that is something that no other community has to offer. And I think that's the biggest attraction."

Bryan Stubbs: "So we've established the Lake Erie watershed as the largest digitally connected freshwater body in the world. Cleveland Water Alliance noticed some years ago that Cleveland was lagging a little behind in being a smart and connected city so we said okay how can we impact that, how can we change that and that's when we had the idea of let's turn Lake Erie into the first smart and connected Great Lake and large freshwater body in the world."

Through the Smart Lake Erie Watershed, Cleveland Water Alliance has created the largest digitally connected freshwater body in the world, establishing our region as an international destination for water innovation.

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CREDITS

Video by Kogent Studios

With additional footage by Great Lakes Outreach Media

Voiceover by Alex Tarasiuk / Replicant Media

2024