Studies and attention from the United States and Canada helped correct many of these problems during the 1980s. Soon, the presence of toxic substances in Great Lakes fish became the focus of environmental agencies in both countries. Eventually, this binational cooperation led to the creation of the Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network (IADN) to monitor trends of nonpoint source pollution in the Great Lakes basin. This article presents some of IADN's current research results. The Web site (www.smcmsc. ec.gc.ca/iadn/index.html) provides more details, in French and English, about IADN projects for the interested reader. The actual data are available through the IADN data request form also found on the site.

A joint venture
In the late 1980s, as point sources were brought under control, suspicions grew that toxic substances were entering the Great Lakes by atmospheric deposition. This meant that airborne pollutants from outside the Great Lakes basin were an additional source of contaminants to the lakes (4). Indeed, following a 1986 workshop sponsored by the International Joint Commission, an independent adviser on boundary water issues to the United States and Canada, participants produced a document confirming that atmospheric deposition was a major source of contamination to the Great Lakes (5). This report led to Annex 15 of the 1987 revisions to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978, which called for the creation of a network to measure the atmospheric concentrations of toxic substances near the Great Lakes www.ijc.org/agree/quality.html. As a result, IADN was created in 1990. | next |