In Canada, watersheds are vast and often inaccessible, making it difficult to monitor the health of these ecosystems. A new tool helps communities collect data to assess the state of Canada’s rivers.
Working waterfronts are a key link between consumers and seafood, but are increasingly threatened by developers. Policies need to ensure that waterfronts remain accessible to seafood harvesters.
Buoys and underwater probes can measure water quality, like this one outside of Cleveland, Ohio.
(Ed Verhamme, LimnoTech)
Warmer waters, heavier storms and nutrient pollution are a triple threat to Great Lakes cities’ drinking water. The solution: Cutting nutrient releases and installing systems to filter runoff.
Air conditioning cools city residents during heat waves, but also strains the power grid and fuels climate change.
Joanna Poe/Flickr
Climate change is making extreme weather events, both hot and cold, more frequent across the Great Lakes region. Weatherizing low-income residents’ homes is an important way to prepare.
A mylar balloon at Presqu'ile Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.
Lara O'Brien
Releasing balloons at weddings and other celebrations is festive, until they break into pieces and become plastic pollution. A citizen science project is spotlighting the problem.
A harmful algal bloom in the western basin of Lake Erie in August 2017.
(NOAA/Aerial Associates Photography, Inc. by Zachary Haslick/flickr)
As climate change intensifies, much of the nation’s building stock will need upgrading to strengthen it against flooding, snowstorms and other weather hazards.
Heavy rainfall and winds caused flooding in southeastern Michigan along western Lake Erie in May 2019.
Tom Hawley/The Monroe News via AP
Over the past 20 years, Great Lakes water levels have gone from sustained multiyear lows to multiyear highs. Climate change is accelerating the transition between dry phases and wet phases.
Historic flooding in the Midwest, including this farm in Nebraska, has caused widespread damage.
DroneBase via AP
A climatologist who studies precipitation trends explains how climate change is projected to make flooding events in the Midwest more severe and more frequent.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Rwanda has a booming economy that is controlled by an authoritarian regime
Christian Marquardt/EPA-EFE
It’s cheaper to prevent biological invasions than to react after they happen. But it’s hard to detect invaders while there are still just a few of them. Knowing when and where to look can help.
There’s a bridge over this Michigan waterway and a precarious pipeline beneath it.
AP Photo/Al Goldis
A big spill in Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac could have devastating consequences. But does replacing the pipeline running beneath it make sense in a warming world?
Releasing a female wolf on Isle Royale, Oct. 2, 2018.
NPS/Jim Peaco
The National Park Service is moving wolves to Isle Royale in Lake Superior to replenish a small pack on the island. Wolves prey on moose, which are overgrazing the island. It doesn’t hurt that they are charismatic.
Debris pulled from a Lake Erie marina during a cleanup, June 9, 2012.
NOAA Office of Response and Restoration
Roughly 10,000 tons of plastic enter the Great Lakes every year, and scientists want to know where it ends up. There are some parallels to ocean plastics, but also important differences.
Researchers are finding plastics in fish in freshwater ecosystems.
(Shutterstock)
The competition between the two authoritarian regimes has become a fact that, given the regional context, is here to last. It justifies repression and indefinitely postpones democratic expression.