Ahead of a Feb. 4 congressional briefing on Great Lakes science, University of Michigan experts are available to speak on trends in policy, weather, water quality and more in the world’s largest freshwater system.

Mike Shriberg is a professor of practice and engagement at the School for Environment and Sustainability and associate director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research. CIGLR is co-hosting the briefing and Shriberg will be a panelist.

He is also engagement director at Michigan Sea Grant and previously served as Great Lakes regional executive director for the National Wildlife Federation and co-chair of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition. His expertise is on Great Lakes water policy and politics.

“The Great Lakes are the great uniters of the region. But climate change, environmental injustice and partisan politics are pulling at the seams of this unity, creating chaos in the ecosystem and our social systems,” Shriberg said. “The first few months of this new presidential administration and congress will be a test of how unified support is for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which has traditionally enjoyed the most bipartisan support of any environmental issue in the region, and perhaps the nation.

“Funding for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure has also traditionally enjoyed widespread support but will likely face significant resistance in the current political environment. In addition, I expect the strength of and support for the Clean Water Act, which was passed in large part due to pollution in the Great Lakes, to be severely challenged. Whether the Great Lakes and water protection can continue to be a uniting force in Michigan and across the region will be tested in novel ways over the coming months and years.”

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Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome is an associate research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the School for Environment and Sustainability, a collaboration with NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. She is also an adjunct associate research scientist in climate and space sciences and engineering at the College of Engineering. Her research aims to improve our ability to predict hazardous weather, ice and water events in cold regions to better support coastal communities.

“In the Great Lakes region, we are seeing colder-than-normal weather in early-to-mid January. While this has helped lake ice form in limited areas, such as bays, the water surface temperature remains above average due to the much warmer conditions experienced in the past months,” Fujisaki-Manome said.

“Sustained cold air is needed for lake ice to develop further and reach levels typical of normal years. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, whose positive phase usually brings warmer winters to the Great Lakes region, has switched to its negative phase. This shift may indicate the potential for more winter-like weather, with colder conditions. However, it also suggests the possibility of a wetter winter. Historical trends show that winter storms crossing the Great Lakes tend to carry more moisture. This long-term trend, along with potential anomalies, could lead to a wet winter for the region.”

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Gregory Dick is director for the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research and director of the Great Lakes Center for Freshwaters and Human Health. He is also an Alfred F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the School for Environment and Sustainability.

His research focuses on the role of microorganisms in shaping environmental processes, water quality and biogeochemistry. His lab is currently studying the microbial ecology of harmful cyanobacterial blooms that threaten freshwater ecosystems around the world, using Lake Erie as a natural laboratory.

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“Harmful algal blooms continue to be a persistent threat to the Great Lakes. In one of the biggest regions of concern, the Western Basin of Lake Erie, monitoring programs now mitigate the harm, and some progress has been made in management of the nutrients that cause algae blooms, but they continue to occur at levels that are unacceptable,” Dick said.

“Meanwhile, climate change appears to be exacerbating the issue and facilitating their spread; we now see harmful algal blooms in all five Great Lakes. We are also still working to understand what algal toxins are present, what controls their production, and their impacts on human health.”

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Silvia Newell is director of Michigan Sea Grant and professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability. She is a nutrient biogeochemist and microbial ecologist whose research focuses on the effects of excess nutrients from fertilizer and wastewater on inland and coastal waters, particularly harmful algal blooms, or HABs. Her current collaborative work in the Lake Erie watershed focuses on engaging stakeholders—farmers, managers and policymakers—to develop realistic pathways for nutrient reduction.

“Harmful algal blooms in the western basin of Lake Erie have persisted at medium severity over the last few years,” Newell said. “Overall, dissolved nutrient loading and water discharge to Lake Erie have been declining over the past five years, and precipitation has also decreased during the loading season.

“While soluble reactive phosphorus loading from the Maumee River has been lower, the research community is still working to understand how much of the decline is because of reduced discharge compared with implementation of several new management practices in the watershed. The real test of management practices will occur during the next wet year, especially as storms are becoming more intense.”

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Casey Godwin is an associate research scientist in the School for Environment and Sustainability and part of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research. His group works closely with NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory on monitoring, experiments and modeling related to harmful algal blooms, hypoxia and changing nutrient dynamics in the lakes.

“The timings of ice cover, water temperature and nutrient runoff are rapidly changing and becoming more variable between years. These drivers can affect processes in the lakes and problems including harmful algal blooms and hypoxia, but a historical lack of data and observations between November through March each year limits our ability to quantitatively connect changing winter to those ongoing problems,” Godwin said.

“Scientists around the lakes are racing to study processes in winter, but those harsh conditions make it a logistically difficult period of the year to study. The past few years have greatly accelerated our observations of the lakes during the colder months, thanks to collaborative winter sampling by institutions around the lakes, limited sampling aboard vessels when safe to do so, and new instruments that give us samples and measurements even when it would not be possible to venture out on the lakes by boat or on ice.”

Contact: [email protected]