Guelph is smack dab in the middle of three of the Great Lakes. Ontario is 30 minutes south, Erie is an hour, and Huron is less than two hours away going north or west. It seems fitting that a major international conference on the science of the Great Lakes is being held here.
The International Association of Great Lakes Research annual conference, entitled “Great Lakes Solutions: Integrating Across Disciplines and Scales,” is being held at the University of Guelph beginning on Monday, and running until Friday, June 10. Visit the website to learn about speakers, registration and presentations at http://iaglr.org/iaglr2016/.
There will be nearly 600 presentations. About 700 researchers, industry and government representatives, and graduate students will attend. It is expected to be among the largest of the association’s conference ever held.
The science of the Great Lakes covers a vast, multi-facetted array of disciplines and subjects, said Joe Ackerman, conference organizer and Great Lakes expert. He is a professor of ecology and aquatic science in U of G’s department of integrative biology, and has a team of researchers currently doing Great Lakes science.
“There are going to be people talking about pressing problems, because many people are working on those things and very interested in them,” said Ackerman. “But there are also people studying the system, in areas that might not be a problem, but just to understand how it works.”
He said the is much discovery going on. The conference is the annual opportunity to talk about those discoveries, some of which will focus on pressing problems.
The big waters of the lakes, he said, are far from the only interest to scientists. The Great Lakes basin is a vast natural ecosystem, and is also heavily populated by over nine million people on the Canadian side, and 24 million on the American side.
Millions of Canadians and Americans rely on the lakes for drinking water, and those big waters are connected to an extraordinary system of watersheds, including that of the Grand River that Guelph and area is connected to.
The lakes face major problems, Ackerman said. Invasive species continue to enter the system, with potentially severe consequences.
The water quality of the Great Lakes, he said, is an ongoing issue of concern. The study of it encompasses a great many areas of inquiry, including the presence and severity of toxins, things like micro-plastics used in cosmetics, pollutants like heavy metals and pesticides getting into the water system, or high concentrations of nutrients from fertilizer run-off.
He said water treatment plants were installed in the 1970s at a cost of billions of dollars, in an effort to remedy water quality issues related to the inflow of nutrients. But those systems didn’t stop nutrients from ground-water, lawns or run-off from agricultural lands from entering the lakes. Algal blooms that threaten drinking water are a significant problem due to high nutrient content.
“The problem we thought had gone away has never really gone away,” Ackerman said. “It is harder now to control because of all of these different kinds of sources.”
Invasive species continue to invade.
“Every year a couple of species end up in the Great Lakes,” Ackerman said. “Not all of them have huge impacts on the biology of the lakes, or on human enterprise and activity on the lakes. The biggest concern now is four species of Asian carp.”
Asian carp are threatening to enter Lake Michigan, via a canal that links the Mississippi River and the big lake. Many scientists are now studying the problem, mostly to better understand just how bad the impacts could be.
Ackerman said it is not only important to study pollution hot spots on the lakes, but to explore the entire expansive watershed that feed the five big lakes. This requires a multidisciplinary approach.
The research being done, and which will be presented at the conference, will tackle possible solutions to some of these problems, he added.
The location of the annual conference of the International Association of Great Lakes Research alternates each year between Canada and the U.S.
“This is one of the biggest ones,” Ackerman said. “We are expecting close to 700. We think one of the attractions to Guelph is the fact that lots of people who work in agriculture and the environmental issues with agriculture and water, are coming to the conference. We are getting a good representation from people working on the watershed -the natural scientists, the physical scientists, and the social scientists are all involved.”
