University Place  Peter McIntyre Great Lakes Restoration Efforts  May 15, 2013 UP877    cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Peter McIntyre, who's with the Center for Limnology here at UW-Madison. He's going to talk to us about Great States in our Great Lakes: How Smart Restoration Efforts Can Help Nature and People. Peter studies freshwater fish in rivers and lakes around the world. He's fascinated by patterns of biodiversity and motivated by the immense challenge of preserving Earth's natural heritage. He has a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a PhD from Cornell, and was a researcher at the University of Michigan before moving to UW-Madison three years ago. 

Here at Wisconsin, his team studies fish and ecosystem conditions in the Great Lakes, in the Wisconsin River, and then further afield in East Africa, and Hawaii, and then Southeast Asia. He's another one of these speakers who I would like to have his job. [LAUGHTER] They also work with agencies and nonprofits to synthesize knowledge on the world's biodiversity, and to develop sensible conservation strategies. One of the great things about living in Wisconsin is having Great Lakes to our east, Great Lakes to our north, one of the great rivers of the world to our west, and Illinois to the south. [LAUGHTER] Please join me in welcoming Peter McIntyre to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]  >> Well, thank you, Tom, and thanks, everybody, for coming. So, as Tom mentioned, I'm at the UW Center for Limnology, and I'd like to see a show of hands, how many of you guys have heard of or actually know what limnology means? All right. So, I'm proud to have moved to the only town in the world... [LAUGHTER] Where a majority of an audience can say they've at least heard of the word limnology. Limnology is the study of inland waters, lakes, and rivers. 

So you've heard of limnology, that probably means that you're aware there's sort of a research institute or basically a scientific think-tank here at UW-Madison where everyone in that building, from the undergraduates all the way up to the senior faculty, spend most of our time thinking about, understanding patterns and processes in rivers and lakes around the world and figuring out how to manage them better so that they're sustainable and can continue to provide resources, freshwater, fisheries, those sorts of things to our society here in Wisconsin and beyond. So, you may not be aware that in fact the UW Center for Limnology is arguably the world's top, or certainly within the top three research institutes in the world for freshwater research. So even though we're very small, there's a lot of good people there doing good work. So it's really been a pleasure for me to come to Wisconsin. I only arrived here about three years ago, but I do have Midwestern roots so it sort of feels like coming back home. And so, I want to talk today about the Great Lakes, and I'm going to tell a couple of different stories related to the Great Lakes, but they're going to center on one theme and that's restoration. So people like me, until very recently, if you asked us what the applied dimension of our research was, we would talk about conservation generally. So that would be the idea of protecting species and ecosystems into the future. Within the Great Lakes, we've really changed paradigms just in the last decade or so toward a restoration orientation. So that's taking a system which has problems and trying to bring it back to a more desirable state. 

That can be desirable from the standpoint of supporting fish. It can be desirable from the standpoint of having clean water. It can be desirable from the standpoint of not having algal muck wash up on your beach and lake fly blooms bother you when you're trying to sit on your porch or have a walk on the beach. All these aspects of human values are important in the context of restoration. We do have to restore toward particular values, and so there are various kinds of restoration efforts. But there's really been this shift from just thinking about maintaining things as they were toward a proactive sense of restoration where we're seeking to return things to a more desirable state. And so I wanted to start with just a slide or two of autobiographical summaries. So, I'm what's called a muddy boots fish ecologist. Some people would call me a fish squeezer. [LAUGHTER] That means I go out in the field in all those places that Tom mentioned, and there everybody wants to have that job and so you actually have that job and you're working 80-hour weeks, seven days a week in the field trying to chase fish or collect water samples and analyze them for nutrients or what have you. 

We do all kinds of work, always centered on the idea of trying to understand and then figure out how to improve the quality of our lakes and rivers. So, I'm fascinated by freshwater diversity. I'm a big fan of "The Onion," so I'm always looking for a way to stick an "Onion" graphic in. If you don't like "The Onion," then just forget you saw that. [LAUGHTER] But we also study ecosystem dynamics. So it's not just the species that you find in the system, it's the way that that whole system is operating and the contribution that the species make toward those basic processes that define the dynamics of a healthy system. And this is a really exciting time to be doing this kind of work. So there are enormous research opportunities, many of which we're pursuing within the Center for Limnology here at UW-Madison. So, resources like major databases of where you find what species, not just in the Great Lakes or in the state of Wisconsin but worldwide. For the first time in 2008 we got that map that you can see on the left there. 

That's a map of the world's freshwater fish diversity. It's in big blocks. So those color blocks are pretty big spatial units, but still, it allows us for the first time to have a comprehensive understanding of the distribution of fish diversity across the world's lakes and rivers. We now have high resolution hydrology, as you can see in the lower left. Those are extremely high resolution spatial maps of where water flows on the Earth's surface. Obviously that's important for understanding biodiversity and aquatic resources. And then from an evolutionary perspective, on the lower right, you can see the world-class evolutionary tree that came out about a year ago for the world's fish. So until that paper came out we had a fairly rudimentary understanding of the evolutionary relationships among the major groups of fish. That's the first comprehensive evolutionary tree for fish, which are about half of vertebrates. So fish are an extremely diverse group. 

It's not just that they're interesting for their role in ecology. From an evolutionary perspective, it's a fascinating question: how do we explain the fact that half of the world's vertebrates are fish? And having these evolutionary trees helps us to do that. It's also an exciting and occasionally depressing time to be an aquatic researcher because the needs for aquatic resource management are so pressing these days. So, whether we're talking about fisheries or water quality, some of you may have heard about this story illustrated in the upper left there. This is a cichlid from Madagascar, and the London Zoological Society just issued a call this past week for any aquarium hobbyists that might have a female of this species because in the world there currently exists three individuals and they're all male. So, as far as anyone knows, there are no females, and this is a species that we literally see go extinct in the next couple of years unless it turns out that a hobbyist has a female someplace. So those are the kind of stories that we deal with routinely as freshwater ecologists, evolutionary biologists, conservation biologists, and we're now moving toward a paradigm of trying to restore systems so we don't have as many of those stories to tell. >> That's what happened to the passenger pigeon too. It couldn't find a mate. >> Yep. 

The last one died not all that long ago. A century ago. Okay, so just to give you a quick overview, I'm going to talk about two stories, research stories from the Great Lakes and then close with just a few thoughts on what you can do to help with water issues. So first I'll talk about patterns of threat and the restoration efforts that the federal government has been leading for the last five years. Then I'll talk about connections between the rivers and the lakes and all the problems that come from dams and road stream crossings that don't allow fish to get out of the lakes up into the watersheds. And then I'll close with comments on what you can do to help. So, the ground rule for this whole talk is really that water resources are scarce. We should never forget that. Water is precious, and anything that we do to degrade our water bodies is shooting ourselves in the foot in the long run. So, this is the UN statistics on access to clean water. 

Basically, if you're at the yellow or the red end of the spectrum, it means that half or more of your population, this is at the national scale, half or more of the population does not have access to sanitary water. So you and I are in a very luxurious position. You look at North American, it's dark blue, that means that fewer than 6% of the people in North America or in the United States fail to have access to sanitized water. So we know that we can go home, turn on the tap, we can have as much hot or cold water as we want, we can let it run forever if we want, and there will still be more there for us to use. Most people in the world are not so lucky. There are almost two billion people that lack access to sanitized water. So we should never forget that, and that's sort of one of the ground rules of this talk. Things are not always rosy here in the US or even in the state of Wisconsin. So yeah, we're flanked by Lake Superior to the north, Lake Michigan to the east, the wonderful Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers to the west, but we have our share of problems too. This is federal data, the best data available on groundwater withdrawal. 

So that's on the Y axis there, and it's a time series from 1950 to, roughly, the present, about 2005, by sector. All you need to really pay attention to is the green bars there. I've been told to stay rooted to this place so that I'm on camera. So I'm not going to walk over and point it out to you, but you can see that on the far right, that green bar gets really big in 2005. About double the size it was in 2000, which is substantially bigger than it was, say, a decade or two decades earlier. So that's agricultural water withdrawals in the state of Wisconsin. In the last decade, we have ramped up our agricultural pumping of groundwater dramatically, and it's because we like French fries. That's the shorthand for explaining what's going on here. In the central sands, in order to grow potatoes, it's a great place to grow potatoes, but you need a lot of water if you're going to irrigate crops that are on sandy soils. So we're pumping groundwater, growing potatoes, that's what's going into you McDonald's fries. 

We all love McDonald's fries, no reason to blush about that, but it's costing central Wisconsin aquifers their levels. So we're starting to see lake levels drop. This is just the beginning of what may be a really serious problem for the state of Wisconsin. But I use this as an illustration that despite feeling like we have absolute water security, we in fact do have problems currently and bigger problems looming down the road. Okay, so let's talk about the Great Lakes. And in a restoration context, it's really important to look carefully at this map. So what you see is the five Great Lakes. You can see some hazy ghost-like white outlines overlaid on the lakes. So those are other major federal restoration projects. So we're talking about -- Pamlico Sound down in North Carolina, Puget Sound out in Washington, Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia, the Everglades restoration area up at the top there overlaid on Lake Superior, and what you can see is the relative size of these massive federal restoration enterprises is dwarfed by our Great Lakes. 

So as we're thinking about the nature of the challenge that we face in trying to restore the Great Lakes to something like what they once were, this just puts things in scale for me, just a simple spatial scale. We've spent between, say, $1 billion and $10 billion on each of these other federal projects outlined in white. We're now up to about a billion dollars of expenditures in the Great Lakes over the last five years, but just look at the spatial scale that we have to deal with here compared to what these other projects were facing. And there's a lot to think about. This is just a simplification of the host of problems that are facing the Great Lakes. And the ones labeled GLRI priority, has anyone heard of GLRI? That's the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. This is an Obama initiative started about four years ago in earnest. But, essentially, our delegation from all of the Great Lakes states was ready when President Obama took office to ramp up a lobby to have a major restoration effort to try to clean up the Great Lakes. And so the priorities for that effort were eliminating invasive species, or at least eliminating new invasive species, dealing with toxic chemicals, habitat restoration, trying to stop major pollution, chemical pollution from the land. Those were the major core priorities upon which we spent about a billion dollars over the last four years. 

And so as we think about why we're doing this, it's actually fairly simple. In cases like the Cuyahoga River catching on fire for the umpteenth time in 1952, this was one of the last times it caught on fire because this is what gave rise, this particular fire was sort of the starting point for passing the Clean Water Act which subsequently has made the Cuyahoga River a halfway decent river compared to what it was in the middle of the last century. But we still have this class of problems. The Danube River had a major overflow of a chemical holding pond in 2010, turned the whole river red, as you can see there. So all of us can agree as individuals within society that we don't want to have these kind of acute problems. Everybody can agree, rivers should not be on fire, they shouldn't be turned red with chemicals. That's a no-brainer. But I just showed you in the previous slide this whole host of problems that the Great Lakes are facing, and at any given place, the Great Lakes aren't on fire and yet they may have almost every one of those problems acting. And so this is what I'm calling the usual state of degradation. So it's not acute enough that it goes on the front page of the newspaper, and yet there could still be a profound problem there. 

So if we want to translate this into science speak, what we're really talking about is we've got this whole list of things that are getting worse through time. So here we're illustrating water withdrawals, nitrogen pollution, large dams and watersheds, invasive species, fishing pressure. These are all ramping up through time. These are actually graphs of the global scale, but the same thing applies regionally as well. They're all getting worse through time, but how do we do the math to add all these up to have an assessment of the state of the lakes? That's the core challenge that a team based out of the University of Michigan that I co-lead when I was over there took up a few years ago. And so in order to tackle this, what we did was to try to build maps, very high resolution maps. So about a half mile by half mile grid covering the whole Great Lakes, 245,000 grid cells covering the open waters of the lakes. Where across that entire grid we built maps of all of the stressors that are shown in blue here. So when I say stressor, what I mean is just a problem or a threat that's facing the lakes. So you don't need to pay attention to the details, the point is we're dealing with 37 of these stressors, and prior to our efforts there were piecemeal maps for many of these things. 

We didn't actually invent new data in very many cases. Instead we just pulled together regional maps and made comprehensive Great Lakes maps for each of these factors. And when we add them all up, we get this map. So, I don't want to dwell on this for too long, but just to give you the simple version, the red is highly stressed areas when you're counting for this matrix of 37 different stressors, and the blue is low stress areas. It's all on a relative scale. So blue means that relative to the rest of the lakes, you're in good condition. Red means relative to the rest of the lake area, you're in poor condition. So you can see some very striking patterns right off the bat. So Lake Ontario really looks like it's in trouble. Lake Erie looks like it's in trouble. 

Lake Michigan, kind of transitional. Huron has a few bad patches. And on a whole, Lake Superior looks like it's in good shape. So most of that's not a big surprise. We were actually a little shocked that Ontario came out worse than Erie because within the research community everybody thinks Erie is sort of the basket case of the Great Lakes. But when we drill in, one of the great things about these maps is we can drill in on specific locations. So that's what all of these blow-ups in the bottom of the graphic are. Western Lake Erie on the whole, sorry, western Lake Superior, on the whole Lake Superior is all blue. It's in good shape, but if you go to Duluth Harbor, you've got real problems. You've got a hotspot where lots and lots of different stressors, you can think of them as they're just stacked up on top of each other and that's what makes that part of the map red. 

Saginaw Bay, the entire thing is facing high stress. Western Lake Erie, the same story. So this sounds like a pretty boring exercise. We just make a bunch of maps, stack them on top of each other, and generate this thing, and that ought to be a simple effort. This, in fact, was a three-year effort that really required drawing on data from authorities all over the US and Canada and is now feeding into guiding what we do to restore the Great Lakes. And to set the stage for figuring out what our priorities should be when we go to restore the Great Lakes, we can look at graphics like this. This is four things that people care about. Two species of fish that are spawning, yellow perch and lake trout, we know the locations in the lakes where those fish spawn, we know where people go to swim at beaches, and we know where marinas are located, so the areas where people use the lakes for boating. So those are four categories of human use of the lakes that we all can agree that we care about. We may not care about any one particular one, but collectively, society cares deeply about swimming, fishing, and boating on the Great Lakes. 

So now we can ask, going back to this map, we can say we've got the map and now separately we can map out the places that we want to use and thus we care about the condition of the lakes, and we can see where those places that we use plot out on the map of total stress. And so now, on the X axis here, it goes from zero on the left to one on the right. One means you're the red part of the lake; zero means you're the blue part of the lake. And what you can see is that essentially all the swimming beaches are in red areas. And lake trout spawning and especially yellow perch spawning are generally in moderately to heavily stressed areas. Marinas are primarily in bright red areas. So the places that people are using and that we want to be able to use into the future are also the places where when you stack all these stressors on top of each other we really think that the system is in trouble. So there's something that's worth acting upon here. We've got the intersection of the condition of the lakes and the places that we care about, and it's telling us we've got problems. So what do we do about it? We throw a lot of federal money at it, and I'm not saying that in a critical way. 

This is actually a fantastic initiative. This is a map of all the places, 321 projects to date, where there's been an investment of federal resources to try to ameliorate one or more of those problems that I identified earlier. You can see that there in the state of Wisconsin, a lot of this money is coming our way. In fact, I have a grad student who's supported by an effort to restore Green Bay's northern pike populations. So we have a point on this map. The interesting thing when we again go back to geographic mode is we can ask, okay, we got 321 projects, sorry, 231 projects that have been supported by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, where are those located relative to this universe of stress levels across the lakes? And that's the panel on the right. And you can see that EPA, in selecting the places to make these restoration investments, has been really, really good, without having our map in-hand, they were really good at picking places that have serious problems. When we look at the toxic areas, that areas of concern, those include the Sheboygan River, the Milwaukee River, a couple of other spots here on the Lake Michigan shore of Wisconsin. Those too are at the right end of the spectrum. So both of these graphs are showing that the places the federal government currently spends money are highly stressed. 

The problem with this is that, remember, the way we got that stress metric is by adding up lots and lots and lots and lots of problems. So you could only be red if you have, say, a dozen to 15 or 18 major problems. What these projects are tackling is just one or two of those problems. And so we're just at the head end now of, we're not trying to be hypercritical, but we're at the front end now of doing analyses of can we actually expect to get any return on that massive investment, on that expenditure of about a billion dollars if we're fixing one or two out of a set of 15 or, in extreme cases, 20 major problems? So, yeah, not that anyone would argue that getting rid of copper in the sediments or getting rid of invasive mussels or sea lampreys is a bad thing. We all want those things to happen, but it just happens that the places that we've selected are places where there are so many problems that investing millions of dollars in alleviating a couple of those problems may actually be a drop in the bucket in terms of restoring the system's overall health. So, we're just on the front end of thinking that through, but this is an illustration of what I mean when I say smart restoration investments can be important to society and to nature. We've clearly done a good job in finding the really messed up places. We now need to ask ourselves whether that was a strategic investment, and, if not, we need to have rules down the road that next time we spend a billion dollars that we can pick places a little more strategically. So, just to summarize this part of the presentation, hopefully I've convinced you that when you add all these things up, there's real cause for concern about the state of the Great Lakes. And anybody that visits the Great Lakes shoreline knows that there are a variety of problems. 

Usually when we sense that there are a variety of problems, we're actually only detecting one or two of the things that are on our list here, but collectively they add up to problems much deeper than what most of us can recognize just standing on the lake shore or going for a swim. Interestingly, society is most reliant upon places that are very highly stressed. This is a non-random spatial pattern of the places that people use and the places that are highly stressed, and that's really troublesome and acts as a keen motivation for us to make those restoration investments. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it's money well spent if we can actually make a dent in the problem. The question is: are we making a dent in the problem? And so we're, by targeting high stress areas only, we may or may not be making the right call. Okay, so now I want to switch gears. I should had said at the beginning, I love interruptions, so if you have any questions, by all means just raise your hand or just ask. I'm happy to be interrupted. Any questions at this point? >> You said how important water is and it's important to conserve water... >> Yep. 

>> Yet that's not the message that I see on my water bill. If I was to run the water for two -- a day for one minute each for an entire year, I would only be charged $2 more for the water it would take to do that. That's about 1500 gallons of water to do that. How can we have-- our water bills are used for large commercial users, because half of our water bill is just a connection fee. >> Yep. >> Where do you get traction to have conservation be rewarded on your water bill? >> Okay, so obviously there's a big element of that question that I'm both unqualified and just incapable of really resolving for you. But let me give you a few thoughts before switching over to migratory fish. So you're absolutely right. Your water bill is dominated not by your actual water consumption but by the cost of making that clean water available to you. When I show you a map that shows all this red area within the Great Lakes or if I were to show you the same thing for our aquifers and basically contamination of the groundwaters, not with acutely toxic things but with nutrients that are washing off farm fields and going down into the soils and joining the aquifer, it's pretty horrifying what a mess we've made of our freshwaters. 

If you look at the fish consumption advisories on Wisconsin lakes or lakes anywhere in the United States, it's absolutely horrifying how many lakes you shouldn't eat the fish from. So the bottom line is as a society we have chosen to put up with that level of contamination, and the other half of that agreement, that societal agreement, is that we have technologies that allow us to clean up the water just before it goes into our pipe. That's the reason your water bill is high. So we've messed up the capacity of this system to cleanse itself, and we're constantly adding more and more chemicals to this system. This is the nutshell version, of course. And that all works fine as long as our civil engineering systems are operating smoothly, but they are not free. So, the sort of water cleansing services that a wetland provides is effectively free, but we've plowed over all the wetlands so we don't get those services anymore. And that's an underlying message, really, of everything that I have to say. By and large, we rely on these resources, and it's actually cheaper to have access to healthy water bodies and fisheries and all of these things if we make investments in protecting nature than if we invest in civil engineering strategies to clean up things just before we want to use them. So that's probably as far as I want to go there. 

>> I remember around the time of the first Earth Day, Lake Erie was considered to be a completely dead and dying lake, and then supposedly in the years after that they remediated the problem to some extent so that it was living again. Why have they backslided since that time? >> Great question. Okay, so the question is about the status of Lake Erie. So, say, 30 to 40 years ago, certainly 50 years ago, Lake Erie was a real mess. There were major dead zones. A dead zone is basically where you've got very low oxygen. Everything that lives in water, we breathe air, we extract the oxygen from that air, and that's how we fuel our metabolism. If you're a fish or a bug or a mollusk, you need to get the oxygen out of the water, and there's not all that much oxygen in water to start with. So you've got a respiratory challenge to begin with. If you then have massive growth of algae because of nutrient pollution, so adding nitrogen and phosphorus to a water body creates these algal blooms, we're all familiar with that here in Madison with Lake Mendota and Monona and Wingra, so an algal bloom is where you get too much growth of algae. 

When that algae dies, the bacteria consume oxygen as they're degrading the dead algae. And that causes a depletion of oxygen in the water and you end up with a dead zone if you have a sustained algal bloom. Lake Erie, 50 years ago, was basically one giant bathtub with a sustained algal bloom during the warm times of the year. That caused these massive dead zones, and the solution was to stop pumping phosphorus into Lake Erie. Primarily, the control measures have been via municipal wastewater streams. So we now are pulling the phosphorus out of our wastewater before it goes into Lake Erie rather than just letting it go into Lake Erie and fuel those blooms. So that really made a big difference in the problem the same way it has here in Lake Mendota. We've actually, Madison has really gotten its phosphorus loading under control. If you're familiar with any of the friends of name your lake groups around town, you probably hear about phosphorus pollution and don't put your grass clippings or leaves into the storm sewers and this kind of thing. That's all about phosphorus control. 

So here in Madison, the big cities on the Lake Erie shore, all through the Midwest, we've gotten a lot better at controlling municipal phosphorus. We still stink at controlling agricultural phosphorus. And so Lake Erie got a lot better by cutting out some of those sources of phosphorus. Now with climate change plus continued loading from farm fields it's actually getting worse again. >> It's mostly political I think, but the Cuyahoga River is now designated a National Park area. >> Yep. The encouraging message there is things can change. And so we should never forget that. So I want to move on now just to talk for a little while about migratory fish. Because I'm a fish biologist, I've got to talk about fish specifically a little bit. 

And here I want to emphasize the linkages between ecosystems. So we've got the Great Lakes, we've got tributary rivers, fish, there are many, many species of fish in the Great Lakes that have to, in order to complete their life cycle, move out of the Great Lakes where they spend most of the year up into a river in order to spawn. So think northern pike, think walleye, think all of the Pacific salmon, your steelhead, you coho, your Chinook salmon, but then there's a lot of native species that you may not think about. I'm going to talk about suckers, perhaps the most ignoble of the native fish but actually, I would say, the very coolest and most important one. And this is really, just to give you the kind of university perspective on this, this is a major shift in the way we think about conservation in the last 10 or 20 years. It's trying to make the connection that species play important roles in ecosystems, and so if you get rid of a species, you can affect the entire system. And conversely, if you degrade an ecosystems, you can start to lose species. And so you can have this kind of positive feedback that leads you into a catastrophic situation, and understanding those connections between species ecology and ecosystems ecology is really a major frontier now in our field. So as we think about migrations, we think about things like passenger pigeons, we think about things like the Serengeti wildebeest, like the monarch butterflies, like the cownose rays on the east coast. These are huge, huge aggregations of animals that move from one place to another, and when they do that, those connections between ecosystems that are the migratory pathways that these animals use, those are essential to those species but the ecosystems themselves would be fundamentally changed if you block the animals from making those movements. 

And so that's intuitive to us as we think about conserving monarch butterflies or the loss of the passenger pigeon. It's famously or infamous in the case of the loss of the bison migrations in North America where by 1889 we'd eliminated what used to be a herd of millions and millions of bison and just restricted them to a handful of places well over a century ago for no very good reason. So, lately, as exemplified by the National Geographic cover from about a year and a half ago, people are starting to think a little bit more about these migrations, partly because they are spectacular natural phenomena. If you ever have a chance to go see the wildebeest in the Serengeti in east Africa, by all means do it, but also, as you see a monarch fly by your house here in Madison, think about where that monarch is headed or where it came from. And it's just staggering the distances that these organisms move. And so what I want to tell you about is the plight of Great Lakes fish, and I would argue that this is one of the great migrations of North America that you probably have never heard of is suckers moving out of the Great Lakes into our tributary rivers. And so the basic problem, or at least the way it's been framed for most migratory fish is dams, dams. All right? So, dams are barriers where, for human purposes we put in a dam because we want to have a reservoir that holds water when ordinarily the river channel wouldn't hold water or we want to control flooding or we want to have hydropower. There are lots of reasons we put in dams, but at the end of the day, here in 2013, we've put in a heck of a lot of dams all across not just North America but the entire world. If you're a fish and you're trying to get from place A to place B, that's a real problem. 

And so I'm going to tell you what's at stake, I'm going to give you some maps of the scale of the problem here in the Great Lakes, and then talk about just some models that we're using to try to understand how to go about solving this problem. So loss of these connections, the loss of the capacity for fish to get out of the Great Lakes into a river really hurts the fish. So here's a dam. There's hundreds of fish piled up below the dam. Just last weekend I was out on the Door Peninsula working on the sucker migrations, it's a spring migration, and we had thousands of fish piled up below some of the dams or impassable road culverts there on the Door Peninsula. And what's at stake is fisheries, in order to complete their life cycle, for instance, the salmon many people like to catch, or the steelhead, those fish have to get up into the tributaries because that's where they breed. It's true for dozens of our native species as well. Something that's a little more subtle but actually no less important is the fertilization effect. So, if you want to grow tomatoes in your garden, what do you do? You put down manure, you put down some chemical fertilizer, and those nutrients are what makes the plant grow in an efficient way, and that's how we get a good harvest of spinach or tomatoes or corn or whatever. So fish serve this role in ecosystems. 

So the famous example in ecology are the Pacific salmon. They're dead along the side of a stream, so those are adults that have reproduced and now they're contributing their entire carcass to the nutrient budget of the stream. It gets pretty nasty and stinky, but those streams would be infertile without the nutrients, the fertilization effect, that comes from the adult salmon after they've spawned. And so you can see the amount of nitrogen on the Y axis there scales with the number of fish that came in year after year with sockeye salmon runs in Alaska. And so my research group has been asking here in the Great Lakes do we have an analog to this famous ecological story of Pacific salmon that fertilize their rivers? And you can see a dead sucker in the lower left on this figure. And that's hopefully a hint of what's to come. So, suckers are very poorly studied, but there are tens of millions of suckers that are moving from each of the Great Lakes every year out into the tributary rivers. That's where they need to go in order to spawn, and these are some of the most abundant fish in the Great Lakes, even though nobody think of them at all when you're thinking about fish of the Great Lakes. They're pretty big fish. They'll stay this big. 

They're very abundant in the near shore areas, and they're by far the biggest of the Great Lakes fish migrations. Often considered trash fish, but what I'll show you is that they're a really big deal. So fishermen notice these fish. This is something I pulled off the web a couple of years ago. So this is essentially a complaint filed by the fishermen of Oconto County against suckers where on the DNR's stream conditions report they were reporting many anglers using a variety of baits had the same results: nothing but suckers. The water is essentially a living carpet of suckers. And that's what happens in every stream around the Great Lakes every spring. It's when the water is pretty cold so most of us don't get a chance to see it, but these fish just carpet the bottom but not as dead carcasses but as live fish. They run in, they breed, and then they go back to the lakes. Some of these fish can be 15 or 20 years old. 

This was a huge deal for the Native Americans. Easy pickings when you've got 10,000 fish running up into a little rinky-dink stream. It's also been a big deal since European colonization. So, in Omer, Michigan, this is over near Saginaw Bay, a Lake Huron tributary, this will be the 130th year of the Rifle River Sucker Fishing Festival, which even included, in 1983, the sucker queen beauty pageant here. So you can imagine the passions of these young ladies competing to be the sucker queen for the year. [LAUGHTER] This is the way a sucker run looks to somebody like me, or actually, more importantly, to my students. So you can't see it very well, but that is what we call a trap net. So you see the wings extending out to the right, the fish are coming downstream, they get funneled into a holding pen, and that's in between those two lines on the water surface. There's about 1200 fish in that net. You can't see it very clearly because of the lights here, but there's about 1200 fish which is about a half day of just pulling fish out of the net and measuring them and letting them go about their business. 

So, in a way it's a nightmare to deal with practically day in and day out, because these fish migrations are so big, but it's absolutely spectacular when you realize the sheer number of fish that are moving into this very small upper peninsula Michigan stream. So, does it matter? I'm going to try to be quick here. Just show you some of the vignettes of our research. So, in a nutshell, the answer is a huge yes. The number of fish in the stream is shown by that dashed line, and so we're looking at a time course from late April though late May here. This is taken a few years ago in a very small stream where we got about 7,000 or 7500 suckers that were in that stream at the peak of the migration. So again, these are big fish, 7,500 of them in a stream that's only 5-6 yards wide. So that's the time course of the number of fish in the stream. We know that because we were trapping every one as they came in and went back out. And then the blue line is nutrient dynamics. 

So you can see the nutrients on the left in late April are starting low and then they rise up. There's some spikes, those are from storm events, and then at the very end of the time series, just as all the fish are leaving, the nutrients crash again. This is the fertilizer that the fish are adding to the stream. And I'll show you why it's important, but first I'll take a question. >> What does SRP mean? >> Soluble reactive phosphorus. So this is basically what's coming out of your municipal water treatment plant if it's not functioning properly. This is the phosphorus that would cause an algal bloom in Lake Mendota or in Lake Erie, but in these low nutrient streams it's absolutely essential for the productivity of the stream. And so we've got a bunch of ways of assessing that. We can look at the breakdown of organic matter that falls into the stream. So basically tree leaves go into the stream, bacteria and fungi chew on those, and that's a key part of the way the system works. 

If that stuff piled up, it would be a big problem needless to say. We can look at the growth of the algae. The algae are what the bugs eat, and so we can look at the growth of the insects also. And I'll just go through these quickly. This is the breakdown of leaf litter. So we put a bunch of leaves in, we measure how fast they degrade. So in that upper panel you can see the blue lines are streams, this is a survey of 10 streams, the blue lines are streams where you don't have many suckers, the yellow lines or the orange lines are where you have an intermediate number of suckers, and that one red line that's the lowest line there is where you have a whole lot of suckers. And so the more suckers you have, the faster the leaf litter breaks down or is lost. That's what you're seeing on the Y axis there through time over the course of three weeks in this example. So, if we didn't have the fish come in, you'd get a build up of all this junk that's falling into the stream from the surrounding forest. 

So how about the algae? So we can do experiments, that's what you're seeing on the left here where we add nitrogen or we add phosphorus or we add both or we don't add any nutrients, and we measure how fast the algae grows. And you can see in the high fish stream or the intermediate fish stream or in the low fish stream, in every case if we add nutrients, algae grow faster. So that's the experiment. Now in the lower right-hand side you can see the amount of nitrogen that we see associated with the arrival of the fish, and on the Y axis is the algal growth rate when we put tiles in the water. And that picture you can see some white squares in the stream bottom. It's basically just a bathroom tile we put on the bottom of the stream. We measure how fast the algae grows on that tile. In the streams where the fish are putting lots of nitrogen, the algae grows fast. So we've got documentation that the fish fertilize these streams, and this means a lot to not just the algae and the breakdown of leaf litter but also the bugs. So bugs are the base of the food web for any stream. 

This is what the fish want to eat essentially. And I'll just highlight the lower right figure there. So that's the amount of nitrogen that came in via the fish is what's expressed on the X axis, and the Y axis is how big the bugs grew. So you can see that the more, this is surveying across a bunch of streams, the more nitrogen that the fish brought in, the bigger the bugs grow. There's also a shift in the timing of their metamorphosis, and this means something, not just if you're a bug, but it means something if you're a bat, or if you're a bird, or if you're a bear, if you're an eagle, or an osprey. All of these animals we put out camera traps. I couldn't find the bear pictures, but the bears and the eagles and the ospreys love to come in and grab these fish. So our charismatic megafauna, the big species are fond of eating suckers. The bugs are eating the suckers, as you can see in the lower left. Fish eat the eggs from the suckers. 

You add this all together and if you took away that fish migration, then the whole system would be in real trouble. It's not just about the fish. It's about the integrity of the entire system. Okay, so now let's think about how often we're taking away these fish migrations. So, on the left you've got a road culvert. We're looking underneath a road here out toward Lake Michigan. On the right, that's a low head dam. This is one that was actually put in deliberately to stop sea lampreys from getting up into the streams to breed. But we know we've got at least hundreds if not thousands of dams in the Great Lakes. What my research team in the last year has done is to actually map out all of these dams and then also to map their road crossings. 

So it turns out in total between the US and Canada we're looking at about 7,000 dams, and those are effectively impassable for a sucker or most of the other native fish species. So we've created a complete barrier where these fish come out of the Great Lakes and they bump into the dam and they're stuck. Has anyone here seen the muskie trying to jump over the dam at the outlet of Lake Wingra? So Tom has, few other people have. On the one hand, it's really cool to see a 40-inch fish trying to leap over an 18-inch dam, but if you actually think about what's going on there, it's pretty sad that these fish are trying to get out of Monona into Lake Wingra in order to breed. They're looking for wetland habitat in Lake Wingra and they can't get over that dam. They're trying their best and they'll try for a whole month, but they just can't get over it. So that's what we're looking at when we're talking about dams around the Great Lakes basin. >> Why, when the DNR rebuilt that three years ago, did they put in a dam? >> I can't answer that question. [LAUGHTER] >> Can't or won't? >> I actually don't know the answer. If I knew the answer, I would happily give it even if it was impolitic, but I don't know the answer. 

So now let's think about road/stream crossings. I told you there was 7,000 dams, big problem. Road/stream crossings, 269,000 road/stream crossings. So, road/stream crossings, often those are not a problem for fish. The fish can just swim through the culvert pipe or if it's a box culvert on a big river, no problem, or a nice bridge. But when we do a field survey, we estimate that about 36% of that 269,000 road/stream crossings are fully passable, no problem. But that's 36% of 269,000. So what that means is that we still have on the order of a 170,000 or 180,000 road/stream crossings compared to 7,000 dams that are at least partly impassable to fish. So this is actually an unrecognized but much, much larger problem. >> What makes impassable? >> Basically, the steepness of the culvert pipe. 

So you've got one of these corrugated pipes that runs underneath a small road. If it's pitched at too steep an angle, the water flows through so fast that these fish just can't swim through it. Or if there's a drop at the end, that's the real killer because effectively it's like a dam. If the pipe comes out and then the water has to fall vertically to get down to the stream surface, then a sucker or a northern pike is completely finished. The salmon can get through that but any of the natives can't do that. So, the bottom line is there's 38 times as many of these road crossings as there are dams. Nobody had realized that until we did the math here. And so what we're doing now is to ask the question for restoration purposes: what could we do to fix this problem and how much will it cost? So the X axis in this graph, this is from a mathematical model, but it's actually a pretty simple one. It just accounts for the amount of habitat upstream of one of these barriers, the location of the barrier within a watershed, and so now we're accounting for all the individual barriers. So we can say how much habitat do you get access to if you take out one barrier before the fish would hit the next barrier upstream. 

So that depends on the overall habitat area, the position of the barrier, and then we also have a cost estimate. How much does it cost to upgrade a road/stream crossing or to pull a dam out completely. So, if we, and basically we have around 300,000 square kilometers of accessible tributary habitat right now without spending a dime. So this is a curve that describes if we spend money, from zero dollars to one billion dollars, how much extra habitat do we gain access to. So you can see if you spend about $200 million, a big number but actually we just spent a billion dollars on priorities that included road/stream or barrier removals in the Great Lakes. So maybe $200 million over a 5- or 10-year period might be feasible. Then we can roughly double the amount of habitats available to this migratory species of fish. But what's really cool about this curve is look how steep it is at the very bottom. That means that by spending, if you're strategic, by spending very little money, you can get a huge return on that investment by picking the places where you've got a relatively inexpensive project and a whole lot of habitat upstream of that project. So if we just high grade projects and pick those areas, which our model tells us exactly where those areas are located, then for a pretty modest investment of restoration dollars, we can get a pretty substantial return on that investment. 

We could spend a billion dollars and we get almost triple the amount of fish breeding habitat, but a billion dollars is a lot of money. Whereas, you can spend $10 million or $20 million over a decade and get almost a hundred thousand square kilometers of additional habitat. So the point here, going back to the title of the presentation, is if we're smart about the way we go about restoration, and it requires maps which take years to build and smart grad students and postdocs and dummies like me to supervise them, then we can figure out intelligent ways to do this. Tom, am I out of time? [INAUDIBLE] Okay, if you need to leave, just get up and go. Otherwise, I'll keep on trucking here. So, any questions about migratory fish and connectivity before I give you a few ideas on how you can help? >> Can you summarize the relation between the fish and... [INAUDIBLE] >> Yep. Okay, so the way that dynamic that I described works is you've got a low nutrient stream, the fish come into the stream, a few of them die, most of them live, but they drop huge quantities of eggs within the stream. So they're trying to reproduce. Many of those eggs don't survive, and the nutrients that are in those eggs come into the water and fertilize the stream. 

So then the algae take up the nutrients that have been lost from the dead eggs or occasionally from the dead fish, and that encourages the growth of the algae which gets transferred into insect growth which gets transferred into fish growth or bat growth or bird growth. So it's kind of a cascade from if you have fish migrations, then you have this potent source of nutrients that you can add to the system. >> You talked about the barriers being put up to control the lamprey. >> Yep. >> If you take the barriers out, do we have a lamprey problem then, or is there some other method that you've got to control the lamprey? >> Yeah, so this is a great question. As soon as we announced that we were working on this topic, we got a shot across the bow from the authorities whose job it is to control lampreys. I'm happy to say that we're now working closely with them to integrate lampreys into the strategies that we use and the mathematical model to select the priority barriers to remove. So, essentially, I told you about a model that has the amount of habitat, the location of the barrier, and the cost of its removal. We can just add the lamprey production potential associated with each of those rivers as a cost within the model, and then the model will guide you away from places where if you took out a barrier you'd suddenly open up huge amounts of good lamprey habitat. So this is another case where by thinking ahead we're able to strategically avoid the problem that you're suggesting which it could indeed be a huge issue, but not every stream is good for lampreys. 

And so you can select the ones that are good for native fish, not good for lampreys, have a low cost of barrier removal and a big habitat gain upstream, and then you've got the winning places. Does that answer your question? I made it sound easier than it actually is, but we're working with the folks who have the numbers on lampreys, and we're pretty optimistic that we'll still be able to identify a good number of sites where there's no lamprey cost to barrier removal. >> Is that the same situation as with the Asian carp? >> Asian carp. So, the Asian carp, nobody knows what's going to happen with Asian carp, whether they're even in the lakes yet, they probably are in southern Lake Michigan in very low numbers, but that's still at a speculative stage for that. Asian carp are probably never, most fish biologists think that Asian carp are never going to do that well in the Great Lakes because the zebra mussels have already removed the food that the Asian carp would ordinarily want to use. So there are a few places, yeah. There's an idea that we call invasion meltdown where if you have invasive species after invasive species after invasive species, the whole system melts down eventually. In this case, it's actually one invasive species is probably going to prevent a serious invasion of these carp species. Okay, so let me just close with a couple of thoughts on both individual actions or individual responsibility and the role that it plays in the global water system and the local water system, and then also just a few examples of public policy, or one example of public policy shifts. So, has anyone tried using one of these web tools called a water footprint calculator? So if you haven't done this and you have an internet connection, I highly recommend, National Geographic Society has one of these. 

Did anyone see Sandra Postel's talk at the Overture Center about two months ago? Okay, so one person did. A couple. So that was a great talk, a masterful talk by a staff member from the National Geographic Society who's been studying global water issues for a long, long time. She's really pioneered many of the ways that we think about water systems at the global scale. And so her team put together the National Geographic Society water footprint calculator. There are a couple of others available online. What they do is they let you input really basic data about your lifestyle. And this is not contributing your personal data to big brother or anything like that. This is just to calculate how much water it takes to support the way that you live. Okay? So you enter information about what you eat, about how you get around, planes, trains, automobiles, bicycles, your home use, how many showers you take a day, how many times you flush the toilet, that kind of stuff, and the materials you consume, how big is your house, those sorts of things. 

And so it kicks out data more or less like this. So this was a generalized calculation for your average American, where the average American lifestyle requires about 2,000 gallons of water per day. If that sounds like a lot of water, it's because it is a heck of a lot of water. So that's about three-quarters industrial use. So, in other words, the things that we use, our Tupperware, our Saran wrap, our shoes, that kind of stuff, takes about three-quarters of our water footprint. So every day about 1,500 gallons of water are used to produce the things that we use on a daily basis. And then food is the other quarter. So in fact, our domestic household use is just a drop in the bucket, so please take short showers, please use a low-flow shower head and a high-efficiency toilet. But actually, not buying a t-shirt or not eating hamburgers or something like that may make a much bigger dent in your water footprint. And just to give the food example, so this is taking that 25% of the water footprint that's from diet and blowing it up here at the bottom. 

Meat is by far the dominant component of the dietary water footprint for most Americans. So make of that what you will, but it's pretty informative to go online and enter your information and kind of see how things play out. So just to give you an example, it takes about 700 gallons of water to make one t-shirt. People debate the number for meat production, but it's actually not the high end but a modest estimate based on what I could find is about 4,000 gallons across the full life cycle or the supply chain leading up to a hamburger on your plate. >> Is that with our without fries? [LAUGHTER] >> That's not counting the central sands aquifer pumping for your French fries. And so, by extension, if you have solar panels on your roof, you're potentially reducing your water footprint because you're producing your own energy. And actually, energy production is a big part of that 75% of our water footprint. So that's just a few thoughts about individual responsibility. So things that each of us can do individually to reduce the demands that we're placing on the public water supply. I would be remiss if I didn't mention broader public policy issues. 

And I just want to give you one example from an analysis that we've conducted in the last six months where we're looking at the future of land cover in North America. So we've got three classes. Urban, so basically where the city is, where high human population densities. Crop cover, where we're growing agricultural crops. And then natural vegetation cover, kind of everything else. So those three sum up to 100% across all of the United States. You can see that in the west and in the Appalachians you've got a large amount of the natural vegetation cover. Here in the Midwest we have a great deal of crop cover. And urban cover in all of eastern US plus the Pacific seaboard. So my comment here is really rooted in the idea of the public trust doctrine. 

One of the foundations of our government system is that government should be managing natural resources in the long-term public interest. So, emphasis on long-term and public interest. The public trust doctrine says that governments are not designed to manage for business. They're designed to manage for long-term public interest. That may sometimes be in the interest of businesses as well, but the root is public trust and the broader public interest. So, with that public trust doctrine in mind, we can imagine different policy scenarios. This is our starting point, this is year 2000 land cover, and we can now project 50 years into the future with different policy regulations. This is essentially, for lack of a better word, this is a different tax strategy. It's not actually always taxes, but that's a way you can think of it. If we want to look at, for instance, an urban containment strategy where we're discouraging urban sprawl so that we don't end up with Madison expending every further out into the hinterlands, and ditto for Chicago and everywhere else, if we have tax strategies or zoning strategies that encourage urban containment, what would be the implications for our freshwater resources? In this case, I'm just showing you freshwater biodiversity. 

So fish species and amphibian species. So, if don't implement any policy changes, you end up with the map, 50 years from now, you end up with the map at the top. And so the red area are places where you have a lot of species to lose and you've had a greater than 5% increase in urban land cover. And so you can see the entire Appalachian chain, a lot of the Great Lakes region, including parts of Wisconsin, are there in red. So these are places where we have a lot to lose from a biodiversity standpoint, and if we don't implement any policy changes, then just looking at current, the way things are working right now and the ever expanding ring of our urban centers, we're likely to see more than 5% change in urban cover. So, when we look at stream diversity, we see that with about a 5% change in the amount of urban land within a watershed you see a massive reduction in the diversity of bugs, diversity of fish, diversity of algae. And so that's why we use that 5% threshold. So if we have the urban containment scenario, you have the map at the bottom. So, note how much less red there is in the map at the bottom compared to the map at the top. These are not per se costly measures, but if we have simple, what you might call, common sense urban containment policy, not telling everybody you've got to live in the inner city, it's just saying we have to have rules about having some reasonable population density before you continue the expanding ring around our cities. 

So we can, with a fairly straightforward and transparent shift in policy, you reign in the spread of urban areas. So now, if we look at what that means for biodiversity, on the right-hand side, you can see those little plus marks. That's the business as usual, the no-regulation approach, and the black circles are under urban containment. So this is, the change in urban cover is the difference between the location of a particular little plus sign versus the black dot that's much lower relative to freshwater biodiversity on the X axis. So you can see we've got one area in this plot that has very high freshwater biodiversity, the ones on the right, and you've got a difference of about 4% urban cover under an urban containment strategy in that very species-rich area of the United States. So, that's enough to make a real difference in keeping those species in our streams. So, I won't talk any further. I'll just say that as a professor, I have the privilege of working with lots of people much smarter than I am, and thankfully younger than I am as well, and so this is a couple pictures of my lab group, and everything I've said here really stems not just from my own thinking but from this whole network of people as well as a bunch of funding sources that are listed there. So I'm happy to take more questions I think I've gone well over time, so if you need to leave, please do. [APPLAUSE]