Background: The GLEN Physical Integrity team believes that maintaining the physical integrity of the Great Lakes – Saint Lawrence River Basin requires a watershed perspective. This focus extends our attention beyond the lakes themselves to inputs like headwaters, groundwater, and other contributing sources; surrounding land uses that affect soil erosion, runoff, sedimentation, and pollution; and physical changes to natural flows such as canals, dams, reservoirs, and shipping channels. From local catchments to sub-basins to major watersheds, this is the physical fabric that defines the health and resilience of the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Embracing a New Direction: A concerted effort to protect, restore and maintain the physical
integrity of the Great Lakes requires a commitment to a watershed perspective integrated with policies and guidelines for water-conscious land use planning, land occupancy practices, monitoring, and adaptive management. Our team will help the binational Great Lakes Executive Committee (GLEC) and the IJC consider broad goals for protecting Great Lakes water quality that include minimum targets for healthy watershed management. These might include prescribed amounts of protected natural covers and of habitat and stream corridor connectivity. Some Great Lakes states and provinces already have versions of these indicators and targets. Some, like New York State’s Riparian Opportunity Assessment Program, are already calibrated down to the sub-basin and catchment level to provide a good diagnostic of where problems begin to arise. But they have yet to be incorporated into local land and water use management policies and practices or coordinated across the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence River Basin. NGOs have an important role in helping to make this connection by educating our local governments on what is at stake and what tools we have for correcting our course as managers of the largest freshwater ecosystem in the world. We can play a proactive role in invigorating partnerships between national, state, provincial, Indigenous, and local governments, increasing public outreach and engagement, and in delivering programs.

Join us: If you share these concerns that a watershed perspective is necessary to truly restore and safeguard the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Great Lakes ecosystem, please join us.