Please join the Great Lakes Center for a seminar presented by Richard Barbiero, Ph.D., senior environmental scientist at Computer Sciences Corporation in Chicago, IL. The seminar is titled “Recent changes in the lower food webs of the Great Lakes,” and will be held on Thursday, September 25th from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. in Science Building, Room 272. Students, staff, and faculty are welcome. Light refreshments will be served.
The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement initiated one of the most successful environmental remediation efforts in recent history, resulting in substantial reductions in phosphorus loading into the Great Lakes. But over fifteen years after that effort ended, and with phosphorus loading having largely stabilized, the lower food webs of the Great Lakes are still undergoing dramatic, and in some ways unexpected, changes.
Lakes Huron and Michigan are experiencing accelerated oligotrophication as well as shifts in their zooplankton communities, and more recently, similar changes have been seen in the zooplankton community of Lake Ontario. In contrast, Lake Erie has been marked by a return to cyanobacterial blooms in spite of the reductions in phosphorus.
In this talk we will be taking a big picture look at these recent changes in the lower food webs of the Great Lakes, examining trends in a number of trophic state variables, zooplankton, and benthos in search of commonalities as well as contrasts.
This is the first seminar in the fall GLC Seminar series. There will be four others.
Some content on this page is saved in PDF format. To view these files, download Adobe Acrobat Reader free. If you are having trouble reading a document, request an accessible copy of the PDF or Word Document.