When considered as an ecosystem, the Great Lakes are experiencing warmer water, changing water levels, a longer ice-free season, and earlier spring runoff. Invasive species are on the move, and there are active efforts to manage and control their migration. This is all taking place in a human-managed landscape that consists of large urban areas, rural–urban interfaces, and rural–wildland interfaces. To be successful in addressing these challenges, solutions will need to take into account the social, economic, and cultural factors involved, as well as natural needs of the area. The broader need for ecological restoration in what is now a human-dominated landscape is not unique to the Great Lakes.

During the past four years, the United States (US) government has taken unprecedented action to protect and restore the Great Lakes. In 2009, President Barack Obama launched the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to coordinate the work of 16 federal agencies that implement over 140 separate Great Lakes programs and to supplement the resources they need to do their jobs. A growing number of members of Congress from the Great Lakes region—from both sides of the aisle—stepped forward to support and sustain the Initiative. Then, in 2012, the US and Canada amended the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to address climate change, invasive species, and other environmental threats that that were not even acknowledged when the agreement was last updated 25 years ago.

The Great Lakes hold some 90% surface-water supply in the United States (US) and about one fifth of the fresh surface water on Earth. As a result, the Great Lakes have immense environmental, economic, and cultural significance, especially for the roughly 42 million people who live, work, and recreate in the Great Lakes Basin.

Since the creation of the Great Lakes with the last Wisconsin glaciations, its ecosystem has endured a diversity of impacts from humans and its surrounding environment. Today, the Great Lakes continue to face numerous challenges from a variety of threats that at times appear to be more rigorous than those of the past. Great Lakes restoration and conservation involve issues ranging from the legacy pollutants of years past, such as heavy metals and synthetics, to an exotic species invasion and quantity issues such as overconsumption. The looming threat of climate change is one of the most challenging that the Lakes will face in the next decade unless changes are made in human behavior. With these and other threats in mind, this issue of Environmental Practice is dedicated to the challenges of Great Lakes sustainability. This issue concludes the thematic year for the journal, which focused on international issues.

In response to observed and projected changes in climate, efforts to promote climate change adaptation to key stakeholder groups have been rapidly increasing. To help us understand the perceptions of resource managers in the Great Lakes region, we conducted a Web-based survey. We asked respondents to define climate change adaptation and to provide examples of both feasible and current adaptation actions. Responses from 441 individuals indicate that many did not have a clear, proactive concept of climate change adaptation. Only 74% provided a definition, and, of those, only 43% described adaptation as a proactive process. Nearly one third (30%) gave purely reactive descriptions, and 27% failed to convey the concept of intentionally responding to climate change impacts; half of these described climate change mitigation or evolutionary adaptation. Examples of feasible actions covered a range of current conservation practices and some adaptation-specific ideas (e.g., research on potential species' range shifts, managed relocation of species), along with such actions as updates to infrastructure. In comparison to feasible actions, actions identified as under way were biased toward early stages in adaptation, such as science and planning, increasing awareness, and capacity building. We suggest that targeted outreach can help catalyze movement from early-stage actions toward implementation of change: collaborative work with stakeholders to refine and customize the concept of adaptation and develop visions of successful adaptation is vital to the long-term conservation of the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Environmental Practice 15:377–392 (2013)

The Lower Menominee River area of concern (AOC) is one of 43 such areas in the Great Lakes region that have been subject to historical degradation and recent remediation activities. An evaluation of the efficacy of the remediation activities relates directly to the assessment of various beneficial use impairments (BUIs) and their associated targets. We discuss development and assessment of the “degradation of fish and wildlife populations” BUI in the Lower Menominee River AOC both in general, as well as a specific case within a section of the Lower Menominee River AOC (Lower Scott Flowage). We discuss process and outcomes related to the involvement of the general public and technical experts, the development of assessment criteria, and provisional results of the evaluation. We developed criteria for fish species of interest, as established by citizens and technical experts, with reference conditions defined as electrofishing catch per effort in similar flowages within the Menominee River drainage. The target for the BUI was exceedance of the 25th percentile for each species from a distribution of comparable data from reference locations. Preliminary results suggest that relative abundance for most species exceeds this target, although additional surveys are considered necessary by the technical and citizen advisory committees before a final determination can be made. Species targets that are not met will provide guidance for species-specific habitat improvement or other management actions that will result in the removal of the BUI designation.

Environmental Practice 15:393–400 (2013)

Based on long-term fieldwork, we report a descriptive SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis performed by a public agency that manages a protected area (PA) system in a densely populated area (Rome, central Italy) to highlight the core limits in this PA's management effectiveness. The key result of the analysis is that the limits of the management effectiveness and the obstacle in setting improvement strategies can be basically derived from the hierarchical command-and-control government approach and from the adopted management model. The main hindrance to the implementation of a multilevel collaborative management appears to be the “institutional stickiness” of the managing public agency in shifting from its hierarchical government approach to a governance one. Having observed the presence of operational gaps among the best solutions in the scholarly mainstream, the governing capability of the managing authority, and what happens in the field, we suggest that an answer to aligning these factors could be the creation of more fluid conditions for bottom–up initiatives—for instance, by monitoring the multibenefits of PAs for local communities or by making available to the public the economic evaluation of public goods.

Environmental Practice 15:401–408 (2013)

There is increasing demand for the implementation of effects-based monitoring and surveillance (EBMS) approaches in the Great Lakes Basin to complement traditional chemical monitoring. Herein, we describe an ongoing multiagency effort to develop and implement EBMS tools, particularly with regard to monitoring potentially toxic chemicals and assessing Areas of Concern (AOCs), as envisioned by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). Our strategy includes use of both targeted and open-ended/discovery techniques, as appropriate to the amount of information available, to guide a priori end point and/or assay selection. Specifically, a combination of in vivo and in vitro tools is employed by using both wild and caged fish (in vivo), and a variety of receptor- and cell-based assays (in vitro). We employ a work flow that progressively emphasizes in vitro tools for long-term or high-intensity monitoring because of their greater practicality (e.g., lower cost, labor) and relying on in vivo assays for initial surveillance and verification. Our strategy takes advantage of the strengths of a diversity of tools, balancing the depth, breadth, and specificity of information they provide against their costs, transferability, and practicality. Finally, a series of illustrative scenarios is examined that align EBMS options with management goals to illustrate the adaptability and scaling of EBMS approaches and how they can be used in management decisions.

Environmental Practice 15:409–426 (2013)

China has consistently striven toward economic growth at the expense of civil and political rights; however, China faces an impasse as its severe restrictions on civil and political rights threaten to damage its economic growth, a tension that is best illustrated by the environmental movement. With the advent of new technologies, the lack of transparency and public awareness that has allowed corruption to thrive is decreasing. As a result, China is beginning to accept that economic rights may be inextricably linked to environmental rights, and that it must sometimes yield to the latter in order to preserve the former. Specialized environmental courts, created by local courts to manage environmental unrest, are the perfect target for concrete reforms that, if successful, would improve the rule of law in China. Moreover, the centralization of local environmental courts may create the backdoor opportunity that the Central Communist Party needs to pierce local protectionism and advance its sincere interests in both protecting the environment and quelling visible unrest.

Environmental Practice 15:427–440 (2013)

This article examines the impact of environmental courts on environmental enforcement in China. Situating the environmental courts within the long arcs of environmental lawmaking and environmental enforcement in China, where a fractured bureaucratic state increasingly drives patterns of experimentation, this article argues that Chinese environmental courts are best understood as “Environmental Protection Bureaus 2.0.” That is, rather than courts in the traditional legal understanding of the term, it is more productive to think of China's environmental courts as another bureaucratic actor. The courts' entrance into an increasingly crowded environmental enforcement hierarchy increases competition and collaboration with traditional and newly created enforcement institutions. This in turn results in institutional feedback that could heighten environmental protection outcomes. The article concludes by briefly examining what these dynamics mean for environmental federalism in China.

Environmental Practice 15:441–461 (2013)

The Laurentian Great Lakes represent the world's largest freshwater ecosystem and contain irreplaceable biodiversity. Lakewide Action and Management Plans (LAMPs) hold the highest potential for ecosystem management in the Great Lakes but have not specifically addressed biodiversity status or strategies for conservation. For four Great Lakes, recently completed biodiversity conservation strategies (blueprints) have assessed the status and threats to biodiversity and recommended strategies for conservation and restoration; a blueprint is under way also for Lake Superior. Here, we compare the completed blueprints and explore challenges to conservation planning for large ecosystems. We also assess whether earlier blueprints are being adopted and offer suggestions for more effective implementation. All of the blueprints focus on biodiversity in the lakes and coastal areas, and some include tributaries and migratory species. Biodiversity status was rated as fair (out of desirable range but restorable) in each lake, with some exceptions and considerable spatial variability. Aquatic invasive species ranked as a top threat to biodiversity in all four blueprints. Other highly ranked threats included incompatible development, climate change, terrestrial invasive species, dams and barriers, and non-point-source pollutants. The recommended strategies are characterized by six themes: coastal conservation, invasive species, connectivity and hydrology, fish restoration, nearshore water quality, and climate change. Each blueprint highlights high-priority strategies, but successful protection and restoration of Great Lakes biodiversity require revisiting these priorities in an adaptive approach.

Environmental Practice 15:462–480 (2013)

A good portion of the effort and funding going into Great Lakes restoration targets the removal via dredging of contaminated sediments from the designated areas of concern (AOCs). In fact, contaminated sediments are the underlying cause of several Beneficial Use Impairments that keep the AOCs from being delisted and restoration success claimed. A common contaminant in the Great Lakes AOCs, as elsewhere throughout the United States (US), is a class of persistent and bioaccumulating compounds called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). There have been 15 sediment projects conducted to date under the Great Lakes Legacy Act program (Tuchman, 2013), and 11 have involved PCB-contaminated sediment. Contaminated sediment is also being removed from the Great Lakes through other programs such as the Superfund; to date, the Lower Fox River Superfund Remedial Action is the largest sediment removal project in the nation, with approximately 2.5 million cubic yards (1.9 million cubic meters) removed through 2012 and the planned removal of another 1.5 million cubic yards (1.2 million cubic meters).