Conserving the world's great lakes: lessons and opportunities in an era of increasing water scarcity
Session Organizers: J. David Allan and Peter Biek McIntyre

Description: Great lakes represent the largest concentration of freshwater resources in the world, including huge volumes of clean water, high biodiversity, and productive fisheries.  Despite their size, there is increasing evidence that the dynamics and ecosystem services of these lakes have been dramatically altered by human activities.  As demands for freshwater and food expand during this century and beyond, great lakes will become increasingly valuable from economic, cultural, and conservation perspectives.  Ensuring that these ecosystems can continue to meet human needs and sustain biodiversity will require exchange and coordination among all sectors of the conservation community, and this symposium will be an important step in that direction.

The goals of the symposium will be to summarize the conservation status and value of great lakes, distill general lessons about their management, and identify strategic opportunities to enhance conservation of these unique and important ecosystems.  Speakers will address conservation of great lakes in North America (Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, Superior), Africa (Malawi, Tanganyika, Victoria), and Asia (Baikal).  Each presentation will focus on a key topic in great lakes conservation while drawing upon examples from lakes on multiple continents.  The organizers of the symposium will facilitate coordination among presenters to avoid redundancy and ensure broad geographical coverage.

Presentation topics will span four linked conceptual areas: biodiversity, ecosystem services and economics, conservation threats, and policy and management challenges.  Great lakes host a remarkable diversity of species, often with very high endemicity.  The value of great lakes as storehouses of biodiversity is threatened by human activities, including species introductions, pollution, over-fishing, and global climate change.  These threats often have synergistic negative effects, as evidenced by the ongoing extinction crisis in Lake Victoria and the surge in harmful algal blooms in the North American great lakes, and such potential interactions will be highlighted.  The world's great lakes also provide humanity with critical resources, including clean water for domestic and industrial purposes as well as bountiful fisheries.  There is growing appreciation of the need to incorporate the economic and social value of such ecosystem services into conservation strategies.  However, even as understanding of the manifold values of great lakes increases, there remain numerous challenges in formulating conservation policy and managing these ecosystems.  In particular, great lakes and their watersheds cut across numerous political jurisdictions, and the large spatial scales involved complicate monitoring and enforcement.

By summarizing the current status and future prospects of great lakes in each of these conceptual areas, the symposium will be informative for new-comers and experts alike.  Coverage of lakes on three continents will highlight similarities and differences that must be accounted for in developing global strategies for great lakes conservation.  Including perspectives from natural scientists, social scientists, and conservation practitioners will facilitate a synthetic understanding of the challenges ahead, and encourage the identification of promising directions for future work.

Our symposium topic is well suited to the Mountains to the Sea meeting theme because great lakes are inland seas that retain ~70% of the world's surface freshwater as it travels toward the oceans.  These lakes are spatial and temporal integrators, responding to shifts in climate, land use, and watershed processes in ways that are certain to affect human populations well beyond their catchment boundaries.  No recent SCB meetings have included intensive coverage of great lakes issues in symposia or otherwise.  Though the North American great lakes are the focus of annual meetings (International Association for Great Lakes Research), and occasional international meetings address other great lakes (Great Lakes of the World every 4 years; International Association for Theoretical and Applied Limnology every 3 years), our symposium will differ in three critical ways.  First, its specific aim will be to synthesize current knowledge across all great lakes rather than present primary data on a specific lake.  Second, existing meetings reach a limited audience of specialists, whereas the SCB annual meeting offers a broader venue for publicizing the challenges of great lakes conservation.  Third, our symposium will include representatives of many disciplines (science, management, economics, policy), thereby fostering a much-needed discussion and synthesis of perspectives.