U-M gets $7.2M to study climate change effects on Great Lakes

Wednesday, October 6, 2010 | Source: Concentrate

The Great Lakes are becoming a bigger area of focus for the University of Michigan, which recently pulled in almost $10 million in federal grants to study the effects of climate change on the world's largest bodies of fresh water.

U-M and Michigan State University are splitting a $4.2 million grant to help Great Lakes-region residents anticipate and adapt to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is funding the five-year study that will focus on how climate change affects agriculture, watershed management, and natural resources-based recreation and tourism in the watersheds of lakes Erie and Huron.

U-M also received another $5 million from the National Science Foundation to study how climate change affects water quality in the Great Lakes. For instance, extreme shifts in weather patterns caused by climate change could cause more water runoff into the lakes. All that extra water brings more fertilizers, creating algae blooms, which cause dead zones in the lakes because they block out the sun.

That would be one of the direct effects. The team of 27 researchers from across a number of fields of study, ranging from biologists to economists, will also study indirect effects such as how dense population around the lakes will affect them in the long-term. That could mean everything from water quality to tourism.

"We're bringing together different communities that haven't traditionally worked together," says Anna Michalak, principal investigator for the study and an associate professor of civil & environmental engineering at U-M.

Source: Anna Michalak, associate professor of civil & environmental engineering at the University of Michigan
Writer: Jon Zemke

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