This week, researchers, government agencies, industry and environmental groups will gather in Cleveland to try to assess the environmental health of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
This week, researchers, government agencies, industry and
environmental groups will gather in Cleveland to try to assess
the environmental health of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Every other year scientists, policy makers, and people who make their living from the
lakes gather to try to hammer out some definitions. The meeting is called the State of the
Lakes Ecosystem Conference, or SOLEC for short. SOLEC is designed to come up with
a set of measurements that will be used to define the environmental health of the Great
Lakes. The initial set of measurements, or indicators as they’re called, was 850. It
included everything from numbers of certain rare birds to amounts of certain toxic
chemicals. That was too much to measure over the long term. So the participants are
trying to come up with a much smaller list of key components of the Great Lakes to
gauge whether there’s improvement or deterioration in the overall health of the lakes.
This year’s meeting is just one more step in the process. It will probably be another four
years before SOLEC comes up with a final suite of indicators that can be measured
regularly.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.