Great Lakes

As the wine industry grows in economic importance, wineries face an increasingly stringent level of scrutiny from environmentalists and government regulators. Wastewater discharge from winery operations is becoming an area of particular concern.

This region’s 10,000 miles of lakefront, coupled with thousands of miles of regional rivers, streams, and inland lakes are an increasingly valuable amenity: In 2007, 2.7 million jobs were linked to the waters of the Great Lakes, accounting for $150 billion in compensation. As these waters are cleaned and made available for development, recreation, and tourism, they enrich the region’s quality of life and can help stimulate economic growth.

The presence of species can be detected by filtering water samples, and then extracting and amplifying short fragments of the shed DNA. In contrast to other surveillance methods, the environmental DNA (eDNA) method does not rely on direct observation of Asian carp to evaluate presence.

After witnessing BP’s devastating Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, some industry analysts are suggesting that domestic natural gas is a good onshore alternative. Even before the spill, some said natural gas could be a “game changer” if new technology allowed drillers to tap into shale rock formations on a large scale. But because the same technology poses threats to water, accelerating this natural gas drilling could be our next energy disaster.

Continuing sources of toxic substances include releases from contaminated sediments; industrial and municipal point sources; nonpoint sources including atmospheric deposition, agricultural and urban runoff, and contaminated groundwater; and cycling of these substances within the ecosystem. The most contaminated rivers, lakes and bays in the Great Lakes – the “Areas of Concern” designated under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement – are undergoing costly cleanups to remove toxic sediments and other pollution.