LEMN Workshop 4.3 - "Evaluating Effectiveness of Land Management Projects: Nonpoint Nutrient Loadings and Nearshore Ecosystem Behaviour in Lake Erie" was a binational video-conference workshop that was held on December 9th and 10th, 2008.

Workshop Overview

Newly developed nutrient management models, coupled with greatly improved GIS capacity to delineate land use have improved our ability to describe the timing and amount of materials exported from farm and urban areas into tributaries. Powerful new hydrological models and sampling technology have improved our ability to track the distribution of materials entering the lake, making it possible to directly predict and evaluate the relationship between nonpoint loadings and biological responses. Modeling initiatives are underway to summarize and predict the behavior of some of these processes.

In 2009, Lake Erie will be the subject of intensive collaborative monitoring by the US EPA, Environment Canada and other agencies, with special emphasis on understanding nearshore conditions. There is enormous value to be gained from coordinating the nearshore sampling program with a parallel land-based monitoring study.

The goal of this OMAFRA-sponsored workshop was to design a binationally co-ordinated, land-based sampling strategy in 3 or more Lake Erie tributaries to describe spatial and temporal trends in delivery of materials from headwater landscapes to the nearshore zone. The resulting data will integrate and provide critical information suitable for use in the newly developed classes of models listed above. This will improve our understanding of how land use affects Lake Erie’s ecological processes.