EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

ANN ARBOR—Several University of Michigan researchers will be among the speakers at next week’s Great Lakes Week in Detroit, a gathering of several organizations concerned with preserving and restoring the health of the Great Lakes.

The week’s events will include meetings of the International Joint Commission, the Great Lakes Commission and the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition’s Great Lakes Restoration Conference. The events will take place at the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel and Wayne State University.

U-M aquatic ecologist Don Scavia will discuss issues affecting Lake Erie water quality at an International Joint Commission public event at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11, at Wayne State. He’ll address the same topic at the Great Lakes Commission’s annual meeting at 8:45 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 12, at the Book Cadillac Hotel.

Lake Erie’s “dead zone” and its production of harmful algae are as significant today as they were when the lake was famously declared dead in the 1960s, according to Scavia, director of the U-M’s Graham Sustainability Institute. Important management actions designed to control Lake Erie’s phosphorus levels were initially successful, and the lake was on the road to recovery.

However, beginning in the mid-1990s, that recovery reversed, and conditions in the lake are now as bad as they have ever been, Scavia said. In his presentation, Scavia will explore the potential causes of the reversal, suggesting that Lake Erie’s watersheds are now under a new climate regime that is enhancing the delivery of highly available phosphorus from agricultural sources.

At the Great Lakes Restoration Conference at 9 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, David Allan, interim dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment, will report on his Great Lakes Environmental Assessment and Mapping (GLEAM) project, which assesses the spatial distribution of more than 30 threats affecting the lakes.

Although broad categories of threats are currently well known, it has been difficult to evaluate the cumulative impact of multiple threats and to understand how different threats vary across the lakes. The GLEAM project aims to develop a high-resolution map of cumulative impacts to the Great Lakes, providing a critical tool for catalyzing and coordinating regional restoration and conservation projects.

By specifically accounting for both threats and resources, the impact map will facilitate basin-wide coordination of management efforts by providing the Great Lakes states and provinces with a unified, quantitative framework for discussion and prioritization.

On Friday, Oct. 14 at the same conference, three U-M-based researchers will discuss Great Lakes economic impact studies at a 9 a.m. session:

• Lynn Vaccaro, a coastal research specialist at Michigan Sea Grant, will discuss the organization’s 2011 study that found more than 1.5 million U.S. jobs are connected to the Great Lakes, generating $62 billion in wages annually.
• Michael Moore, professor of environmental economics at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment, will examine whether the extremely low levels of Lake Michigan between 2000 and 2007 caused economic impacts in the recreation and tourism sector of Lake Michigan coastal counties. His conclusion? “We find little statistical evidence of negative impacts in the number of enterprises and the labor market in the recreation and tourism sector for this time period.”
• Jennifer Read, acting director of Michigan Sea Grant, will discuss a 2007 report on the potential economic benefits of Great Lakes restoration. A team of economists and scientists, including Read, estimated that a comprehensive restoration of the Great Lakes could generate $50 billion in economic benefits. Read will explain how the estimates were developed and which methods could be applied to individual restoration projects.