Great Lake Protection Plan.....Will this plan effectively address the pollution at Lake Ontario?

Great Lake Protection Plan is recently released. There is a five-point action plan that includes "tripartite table" of municipal,federal and provincial coordination for the enhancement of natural areas on the lake fronts. However, based different media news ,"investment in Great Lakes protection and restoration can have a 2:1 rate of return on investment". Definitely, it is a slow process.But, the "tripartite" should not ignore that how much change in the pollution level of Lake Ontario has happened since the studies done in 1968. Pro.K. Wayne Forsythe and Chris H. Marvin have done some research on the historical change in the pollution level of the Lake Ontario. There have been significant changes over time. For my graduate work, I myself was involved in a research project with a spatial interpolation of Zinc sediment in Lake Ontario. The data was collected by Environment Canada in 1997/98. Though zinc is a necessity for healthy being, too much is definitely not good. Our initial analysis showed that the concentration of zinc is in the central part of the Lake, and near Hamilton, the reasons ranging from the sediment movement and the industrial past.


On the map TEL and PEL for Zinc refer to Threshold Effect Level (123ug/g)and Probable Effect Level (PEL) (314.8 ug/g)respectively. The spatial analysis was done using ordinary kriging. There are so many resources on the web discussing kriging, but I will also discuss about them in coming blog...Stay tuned!!!
Overall, the lakes have seen so many changes over the past 40 years.Let's have faith on the Great Lakes Protection Plan.