The Great Lakes Information Network

Institute Profile: The Large Lakes Observatory and the Scientific Study of the Large Lakes of Earth

For centuries the Great Lakes have been treated callously These five magnificent lakes—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario—located along the eastern half of the Canadian–U.S. border have served as a virtual sewer catching waste from industry, agriculture, commercial shipping, and households. Their natural barriers to other water systems have been breached, exposing indigenous ecosystems to aggressive invaders. They’ve been used as a highway for colossal ships that require deepened and broadened channels to crisscross the lakes, and that import exotic species along with their intended cargo. At times it could seem that this long-suffering water system will see no end of indignities. But recent renewed focus on the unique and tremendous value of this resource by governments and communities surrounding the lakes may turn the tide of neglect and abuse. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Great Lakes contain 21% of the Earth’s and about 84% of United States’ surface freshwater. That’s about 22,000 cubic kilometers of water spread over 94,250 square miles. Each year the lakes provide more than 6.7 million cubic meters of water to municipalities and quadruple that to industry. They support a commercial fishery worth about $13 million as of 2002, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and a sport-fishing industry of nearly $1.3 billion as of 2001, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Today about 25% of Canadians and 10% of Americans—a total of more than 33 million people—live in the Great Lakes watershed. “The whole industrial expansion that took place during the ‘robber baron’ era [of the late nineteenth century] expanded along the shores of the Great Lakes,” says Deborah Swackhamer, a University of Minnesota professor of environmental chemistry. Soon ships were carrying iron ore, coal, and limestone from mines and quarries to steel mills and later steel to factories and products to markets. In addition to serving as a transportation system, the lakes provided a place to discharge manufacturing by-products. Unlike a sewer, however, whatever enters this lake system stays awhile. On average, less than 1% of the five lakes’ water turns over each year, which means that many pollutants stay in place. They settle in sediments, adhere to other surfaces, become suspended in water, and bioaccumulate in organisms. Similarly, with the exception of migratory birds, most wildlife in the basin spend their entire life cycle in or near the lakes. As a result of all these stressors, the lakes now house fish that are dangerous to eat, water that can be unsafe to drink, anoxic “dead zones”—areas in which virtually no plants or animals can survive—that appear each summer like clockwork, and an ever-growing population of unwanted species from other parts of the world.

What's the Story

The World Wide Web is a hypertext-based, platform-independent means of displaying text, graphic, audio, and video information over the Internet. Twenty million people now use the Internet, and the number of World Wide Web sites is well over one million and growing rapidly. Web sites are available all over the world, although most are located in the United States. Importantly, the Web's design is consistent with many of our information gathering instincts. It encourages browsing and experimentation and allows each person at computer sites around the world to design unique ways to present and use information. The author discusses its practical applications, explains how hypertext works, and discusses how it is can be used by power utilities. Reserving a password and gaining access to the World Wide Web are also discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The end of a century is a good time to look back and see how past events have shaped both our present situation and our perspective on the future. In this essay, we do this in the context of the emergence of an ecosystem approach to management of the North American Great Lakes. Our goal is to (i) review how the ecosystem approach emerged and became institutionalized in the Great Lakes region and then (ii) discuss why implementation of the approach continues to pose profound challenges for Great Lakes citizens and institutions. We suggest how some of the greatest hurdles might be overcome and share our optimism that Great Lakes institutions are moving, albeit slowly, in the right direction. We have prepared this essay in memory of a former colleague and pioneer of the ecosystem perspective for Great Lakes management, W.J. (Jack) Christie. As we develop our thesis, we will highlight some of the many contributions Jack made, both to the science behind ecosystem management and to helping make the Great Lakes great again.

Pro SharePoint 2013 Branding and Responsive Web Development is the definitive reference on the technologies, tools, and techniques needed for building responsive websites and applications with SharePoint 2013.  The book focuses on solutions that provide the best browser experience for the myriad of devices, browsers, and screen orientations and resolutions. Web technology has changed considerably in the past few years. Microsoft has embraced the new generation of open standards represented by HTML5 and JavaScript, and these changes are represented in a fundamental shift in how SharePoint 2013 supports web content management and publishing. Authors Eric Overfield, Oscar Medina, Kanwal Khipple, and Rita Zhang join forces to dive into the new features and capabilities provided by SharePoint 2013 and combine them with the latest techniques in responsive web design and development to demonstrate how to build modern and progressive websites and applications. Pro SharePoint 2013 Branding and Responsive Web Development covers the following technologies: SharePoint 2013 Server Edition Office 365 SharePoint Online Expression Blend 2013 Napa Tools for Office and SharePoint Development Visual Studio 2012 HTML5 and CSS3 JavaScript, JQuery, JQuery UI, Modernizr, and the Bootstrap Framework SharePoint 2013 Client Object Model

New Editor Announcement

The AEHMS, via its journal (Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management) and the Ecovision World Monograph Series, has been actively engaged in promoting great/large lakes research. Consequently, it established a working group “The Great Lakes of the World-GLOW” for bringing together large lakes researchers to exchange ideas and technology. GLOW embarked on organizing special symposia which resulted in several peer-reviewed publications and special issues. In a short period of about 15 years, the AEHMS has published 11 peer-reviewed books under the banner of Ecovision World Monograph Series (Table 1).Over the past nine years 12 special issues of Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management have been published dealing with great/large lakes (Table 2).Most of the manuscripts included in this special issue originated from the two sessions organized at the following international conferences: “Managing the large lakes of the world: Health, Integrity and risks”Limnological Congress (SIL), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2007“Great Lakes tomorrow: Research tools, toys and techniques”International Great Lakes Research Conference (IAGLR),Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, 2007The papers have been categorized on a continental basis: North American, European and African, and reflect a great variety of topics across these continents. For North America, the themes comprised characteristics of poorly known Canadian lakes, geological history, remote sensing, and aquatic protected areas of the Great Lakes. The European contributions dealt with climate, water quality, phytoplankton, zooplankton, optical counters and remote sensing, the African papers focused mainly on fisheries of Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, Kivu and Naivasha. One contribution, from Dr. Ken Minns, on Canadian lakes was an invited article.We hope that this issue provides a valuable exposé and comparison of the status and health of large ecosystems distributed across the three continents. Such comparisons are essential in providing insights into common themes (biodiversity, food web interactions, fish habitat, and fisheries), and threats (eutrophication, toxic chemicals, invasive species and climate change). They should also aid in the development of models and in application of emerging technology to improve our understanding, monitoring and management of these precious aquatic resources which face multiple stressors (Munawar, 1987; 2000; 2009).M. MunawarFisheries and Oceans CanadaChief Editor, Aquatic Ecosystem Health &amp; Management

Web sites are useful resources for communicating corporate governance information to stakeholders. They facilitate timely information disclosures, which leads to greater transparency and can help to improve investor perceptions. Positive perceptions, in turn, have the potential to boost a firm's performance. In this study, we develop a descriptive framework of governance content and web site design features, and use it to evaluate web sites of companies in the S&P 100 in order to determine differences among various sectors as well as companies with different corporate governance quotients (CGQ), a measure of effective governance assigned by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Results indicate that there are significant differences in how the content is presented despite companies across sectors having standardized the type of content they provide. On the whole, manufacturing and technology sectors display more content. Likewise, these two sectors also appear to use more advanced design elements than finance, health care and services, with several significantly different features. Contrary to our expectation, very few features are significantly different in both content and design across the two CGQ groups though content provides slightly more variance. The study findings suggest that companies can vastly improve their web sites by including more content reflective of due diligence and transparency and by implementing Web 2.0 and other advanced technologies. Companies serious about transparency will adopt a more strategic approach to web content and design. The lists of content and design features identified here can serve as checklists/templates for executives' intent on further enhancing their web design and content.

Every time a Web-based interface is built upon pre-existing data-sources, the result comes often from a difficult and painful process of negotiation between the data manager – who knows the “semantics” of the data to be exposed, but cannot build the UI on his own – and the Web designer – who cares a lot about the presentation and the rendering, but often is not an expert about the content to be displayed.Semantic Web technologies, with their ability to deal with data, their meaning and their representation, can be of great help in those scenarios. In this paper, we present our approach that makes joint use of Web usability, Web experience, Interaction Design and Semantic Web technologies to develop a Web-application framework called STAR:chart, which helps data managers in painlessly building Web-based interfaces upon their data.We introduce the basic concepts, ontologies and software artifacts that make our approach concrete, together with some use case scenarios in which we successfully employed the STAR:chart framework.KeywordsDomain OntologyInteraction SemanticFIRB ProjectSemantic NavigationSemantic PortalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

It was both an opportune time and a stroke of luck that I was offered the opportunity to work under the influence of two limnological titans, namely Drs. Richard Vollenweider and Jack Vallentyne at...

U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office monitoring of the Laurentian Great Lakes: Insights from 40 years of data collection

Since Dont Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krugs guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, its one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject. Now Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Dont Make Me Think a classicwith updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And its still short, profusely illustratedand best of allfun to read. If youve read it before, youll rediscover what made Dont Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If youve never read it, youll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites. After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book.Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

Websites have become a vital tool for public universities. Universities websites are now becoming a hub for various services for various characteristics of users. With the increasing importance of a website, it resulted in new challenges for web designers. One of the challenges is ensuring that the web design incorporates both usability and pleasing web visual aesthetics. This research will look at the web visual design principles used by web designers in Malaysian public universities and the challenges faced by the web designers in designing the websites. Public universities web designers were interviewed for this research. The main findings of the research include the web design process of Malaysian public universities official websites, the web visual design principle used and the challenges faced by the web designers. This research also identified an opportunity for future research especially regarding the challenges faced by the web designers. Â

Coastal wetlands play a pivotal role in the Great Lakes ecosystem. As buffer zones between the land and open waters of the Great Lakes, they perform a variety of essential functions providing both direct and indirect anthropogenic benefits. Geology, morphology and climate are the dominant variables that influence Laurentian Great Lakes wetland development. However, anthropogenic factors are the major contributors to alteration of natural wetland processes. This paper provides an overview of natural and anthropogenic factors important in Great Lakes coastal wetland development and provides statistical information describing the Great Lakes Basin. A brief description of wetlands classification and research issues is also presented.