Ilora Basu

Ecological monitoring for assessing the state of the nearshore and open waters of the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement stipulates that the Governments of Canada and the United States are responsible for restoring and maintaining the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the waters of the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem. Due to varying mandates and areas of expertise, monitoring to assess progress towards this objective is conducted by a multitude of Canadian and U.S. federal and provincial/state agencies, in cooperation with academia and regional authorities. This paper highlights selected long-term monitoring programs and discusses a number of documented ecological changes that indicate the present state of the open and nearshore waters of the Great Lakes.

Differences in Atmospheric Persistent Organic Pollutant Concentrations at Two Locations in Chicago

For years, the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) at Chicago has served as the only urban sampling site for the Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network. Atmospheric concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine pesticides, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in the vapor phase have been measured at this site every 12 days since 1993. These data have been used as representative urban regional concentrations, but these measurements may not be characteristic of the entire urban region. Thus, a second site at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), which is closer to the downtown area than the IIT site, was operated from February through October 2002 to evaluate the possible urban source-influenced concentrations of these compounds. The average PCB concentrations at UIC are higher than that at IIT by a factor of ∼2; the PCB concentrations range from 670–4,600 pg/m3 at UIC and 310–3,000 pg/m3 at IIT. The pesticide and PAH concentrations at these two sites are in general agreement except for higher aldrin concentrations in some samples at IIT.