Thank you very much.
I'm very pleased to be invited to speak.
My name is Jan Ciborowski. I'm a professor in the department of biological sciences at the university. I've been there since 1984. I'm an aquatic ecologist interested in understanding the relationship between environmental stress and the biota that are affected by it. I've been working on the Great Lakes since the early 1990s.
Given the huge areas covered by the Great Lakes and the problems faced, I have worked hard to participate in and to help lead collaborative research among researchers on both sides of the basin and also to work with the government agencies on both sides to identify the problems and try to build collaborative work at a scale that can address these sorts of problems. I'm really pleased to be able to contribute my perspective on the questions raised by the committee.
I'll address each of the questions that were listed. The first question is: what are the areas of greatest environmental concern?
Really, there are two perspectives taken when identifying these areas of concern. One strategy involves protecting areas that are currently of the greatest natural and economic value, especially those at greatest risk of losing their value, which can be by loss of species or of the habitat that sustains them. As well, and in tandem with this, there is the loss of the economic value and the aesthetic value that sustain the people around the lakes themselves.
Such areas have been variously identified through initiatives of the conservation groups, including the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and in the U.S., the U.S. Nature Conservancy. The State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference, SOLEC, developed the concept of biodiversity investment areas in 2000. These have guided many of the initiatives that have been trying to protect areas of shoreline throughout the Great Lakes as well. These are the areas most important in harbouring species of note, their important habitat, or the areas that are especially productive.
In Canada, the responsibility for protecting these areas is undertaken by both the provincial and national parks and special areas, as well as by the OMNR, and locally by the conservation authorities and municipalities. It is well recognized that we protect species and their environment by protecting and restoring their habitat. Nationally, this has been the responsibility of COSEWIC in identifying species at risk in their habitat, and federally of Fisheries and Oceans Canada through the fish habitat legislation.
The second strategy we have, in terms of understanding, is restoring areas that have been degraded to such an extent that their beneficial uses have been impaired. In the 1970s the International Joint Commission identified 14 different beneficial uses of the waters and the lands around the Great Lakes. When these uses become impaired, the areas are called “areas of concern”. They have been targeted for restoration by restoring those beneficial uses.
There are 42 areas of concern that have been identified, 12 in Canada entirely and five that are binational on various connecting channels on the Great Lakes. Of the 17 areas of concern associated with Canada, three have been delisted and two are in recovery. The remaining seven Canadian and five binational areas still have impairments, most relating to sediment contamination and habitat degradation.
The most widespread impairments, affecting all of the AOCs, are the degradation of fish and wildlife habitat and the degradation of the benthic invertebrates that sustain the fish. This degradation leads to restrictions on the dredging of the sediments to reclaim the area and on the consumption of fish. The other major beneficial use impairment is eutrophication, or the growth of undesirable algae. This is true both in the areas of concern on the Great Lakes and in protected areas, as Mr. Sweetnam has identified previously. The greatest areas in which this is recognized are on the shorelines and in the nearshore areas of the Great Lakes proper.
If we really want to restore these areas, we have to understand not just where those stresses occur but also the stress-response relationships. We have to be able to reduce the stress to the extent that those beneficial uses are restored. Understanding the stress is key to understanding the processes, not just the condition. What we have to recognize is that it is the extremes that are important, not just the average conditions. We lose species and lose environment at the worst times, not at just the average times. This means that we have to have monitoring on a continuous basis rather than just of the average.
From a geographical perspective, we're increasingly understanding that in order to control the stress we must look to the inputs to the lakes, not just to the lakes themselves. Although nutrients and toxins were formerly delivered by the atmosphere and by point source pollution—sewage treatment plants and industrial effluents through pipes—more and more we recognize that it's the runoff from farmland and from the suburban and rural areas, which are non-point, that is causing our greatest problems, especially during times of extreme weather conditions.
Runoff from farmland and so on is the primary source of nutrients, especially phosphorous, whereas formerly it was due to materials bound to sediment particles. Increasingly it's dissolved phosphorous that is the cause because this is much more bioavailable to algae, leading to the increase in hazardous algal blooms and nuisance algae on shorelines. It's also due to hypoxia, the absence of oxygen in the deeper parts of the lake when these materials decompose.
If we're dealing with shoreline that is rocky or sandy, the result is nuisance algae, things like cladophora that cause unsightly messes on beaches and shorelines, and when they decompose, they lead to epidemics like botulism and massive bird and fish kills. If the shorelines are muddy or silty, those nutrients tend to run into the middle of the lake where they give rise to hazardous algal blooms through cyanobacteria as well.
In practice, areas of environmental concern represent a continuum. It's not just the best areas and the worst areas; what we see is a full range of degradation. A lot of my collaborations and those of others have dealt with trying to understand and quantify the amount of human activity by type, amount of agriculture, amount of development, population density, and road sources in the various tributaries that are leading to the discharge into the basin.
There are over 5,900 different watersheds and contributing watersheds around the lakes, and we've been able to quantify the amount of development, the amount of stress, which allows us to determine where those stresses are the greatest, where they are the minimal, and where the greatest risks are.
We've been able to take advantage of new technology—remote sensing, and so on—that lets us produce maps for the state of the environment conference, the SOLEC, as well as recently for maps of both the lake and the land through the Great Lakes environmental assessment and mapping program. These are based on anywhere from 34 to 210 different types of stressors. By knowing where they occur, we can identify the best and the worst, where the transitions are that lead to the degradation and loss of the biota that really reflect what we're most interested in. This has allowed us to prioritize areas that are most at risk of biological degradation as well as the areas that are most likely to be able to be restored and as well to identify areas of risk to Great Lakes health.
Historically, we've identified the Detroit River and the Maumee River as areas of greatest risk, but looking at the more recent maps, we've come to recognize, using both the maps and also new genetic techniques, that places like the Thames River and the Sydenham have been providing elevated levels of nutrients that are giving rise to hazardous algal blooms both in Lake St. Clair on the north shore of Lake Erie and other areas that are synonymous with the types of things we've been seeing coming from the Maumee.
Other contemporary threats of ecological and economic use include the effects—