Eutrophication Risk Assessment and Adaptive Management Implementation in Lake Simcoe: Integration of the Watershed Processes with the Receiving Waterbody Year Two

Environmental modelling has been an indispensable tool of the Lake Simcoe restoration efforts. The proposed research aims to develop an integrated watershed-receiving waterbody modelling network that will provide a realistic platform for the evaluation of a variety of land-use management and climatic scenarios. The novel feature of the project is the application of cutting-edge Bayesian techniques that have several advantages highly relevant to the conservation practices of Lake Simcoe, such as the support of management decisions by probabilistically assessing the confidence of compliance with different water quality standards; the optimization of the value of information gained from the local water quality monitoring programs; the transfer of information in space which allows the effective modelling of sites with limited information; the alignment with the policy practice of adaptive management implementation, and the ability to sequentially update all the existing models and therefore serve as a long-term management tool for the system.

Faculty Supervisor:

George Arhonditsis

Student:

Alexey Neumann (Gudimov)

Partner:

AEML Associates Ltd.

Discipline:

Environmental sciences

Sector:

Natural resources

University:

University of Toronto