Conclusion by the Authors.

• Position: A State-Provincial Approach to Harmful Algal Blooms in the Great Lakes Basin: Possibilities and Pitfalls

Speakers: Dr. Kathryn Bryk Friedman & Dr. Irena F. Creed

MR. PETRAS: Well, we're now at that point. I think we've managed to cover the questions from our attendees, at least the subject matter of those questions, and the categories. And it's now time to turn this discussion back to the two people who brought us here with their sub-federal, binational approach to harmful algal blooms, and to get their responses, at least preliminarily, to the dialogue that we've had today. So, I am going to turn it back to Irena and Kathryn.

DR. CREED: Thanks, Stephen, very much. Can you hear me?

MR. PETRAS: Yes.

DR. CREED: Great. So, I'm going first because I wanted to basically provide the highlights of what I heard, and how I think it might influence our proposal for a sub-national agreement. I have four slides to share, and I'll start immediately and then Kate will come through with an overall summary.

What we heard today was, there is basically an expression of the Great Lakes community needs. We need to share data and predictive tools to get ahead of the curve, and we need a hammer to ensure that data-gathering and sharing is done. We also need to share regulatory approaches, and this is at the local to regional levels--how do jurisdictions reduce nonpoint sources and have hotspots? And we also need monitoring, modelling, and prediction approaches across the entire Great Lakes, but also a localized strategy to deal with the diversity of causal pathways that create some of these harmful algal blooms.

In terms of the science needs, what I heard was that we need to consider climate change and invasive species in a bigger way. Land-to-water pathways under a changing climate are increasing the risk of these algal blooms. But we also need to know that the Great Lakes is a very heterogeneous entity, and we need to recognize that the Great Lakes may suffer from too little phosphorus, for example, in the open waters, but too much phosphorus in the nearshore areas.

We also heard the need to integrate diverse knowledges, and in particular Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges into any framework, whether it's a binational, sub-national, or local.

We need convergent approaches, and I am thinking of convergence, here, in the spirit of the National Science Foundation in the United States--one of their 10 [5zg] Ideas report--which is a bringing together of all different disciplines to create new approaches and new ways of addressing problems. So, I say that we need...