Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

""Death watch"", ""poster child for pollution problems"", ""deadly intruders"", ""dead zone"", ""dead"", ""danger of collapse"", ""ailing"", ""sick"", ""stinky scum"", ""fouling"" and ""poison harvest"" are all terms that have been used recently to describe Lake Erie. The lake's current ecological state behind this unfortunate characterization is threatening a multi-billion dollar fishing and tourism industry. Today the Great Lakes, are a dramatically different ecosystem than they were a hundred years ago. This new ecological state (regime) of the Great Lakes needs to be better understood, and soon, since these lakes provide our society with a panoply of ecosystem services including drinking water for the City of Toronto, recreational and commercial fishing, tourism, and transportation of goods, while enhancing regional biodiversity and wetlands. Our project ultimately aims to link aquatic ecosystem services to the current state (regime) of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes. Specifically, we will examine the current foodweb structure of different areas in the lake and its connections to key processes that control the lake's carbon balance (carbon = energy). Our results will provide us with an opportunity to test if carbon/energy flux is sufficient to support the world's largest commercial fisheries historically supported by Lake Erie.