Wetlands can act as a sink for nutrients, suspended solids, and pesticides.
They may remove these chemicals from agricultural drainage by microbial processing, sedimentation, or biomass production. This removal, however, may diminish over time and appears dependent on wetland soils, vegetation, flow-through time, and water depth. A record of this variable, long-term material transfer between water and sediments may be preserved in core stratigraphies. We hypothesized that the North Marsh maintained consistently higher accumulation rates for these chemicals since 1978 compared with the West Marsh. This bay drains into Lake Erie.