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<p>Seasonal and annual water-level fluctuation is a primary mechanism that maintains high aquatic biodiversity in coastal marshes of the Laurentian Great Lakes by preventing formation of dense mono-cultures of emergent or submergent plants. The past 14 years of sustained low water levels in Georgian Bay (Lake Huron) have prompted proposals to impound coastal wetlands as a way to mitigate against desiccation. We hypothesize that a loss of hydrological connection with the Great Lakes would lead to altered water chemistry and an expansion of emergent vegetation at the expense of aquatic habitat. This could result in a fish community with reduced diversity which may positively impact the larval amphibian community. On the other hand, bird communities may respond with only short-term gains, and may not demonstrate long-term benefits without active management. We investigate how long-term severance of hydrological connection between coastal marshes and Georgian Bay affect ecosystem functions. We compare food web components of a chain of three coastal wetlands in Tadenac Bay that were sequentially impounded by beaver activities over the past 5 decades. We also surveyed the food web of Wye Marsh, which was impounded over 80 years ago, and compare it with that of Matchedash Bay, which had never been impounded. In both cases, there were negative impacts of impoundment on water chemistry, vegetation and fish communities. Bird communities showed no significant differences but larval amphibian diversity was greater in the beaver impoundments than in the hydrologically connected coastal wetland. Based on our results, we do not recommend impounding Georgian Bay wetlands as a means to restore and maintain water levels.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOC) are designated geographical locations within the Great Lakes Basin with particularly degraded environmental conditions. There is a consensus among diverse sectors in the Great Lakes Basin that contaminated sediment is a major environmental problem and a key factor in many of the impairments of the human and nonhuman uses (beneficial uses) of the Great Lakes. This case study examines Randle Reef in the Hamilton Harbour (AOC) which is the largest Canadian contaminated sediment site in the Great Lakes containing 695,000 m3 of sediment contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and metals. The cleanup of the Randle Reef site is a major step in the process to restore Hamilton Harbour and remove it from the list of AOCs. The Randle Reef sediment remediation project is finally coming to fruition after more than thirty years of study, discussion, collaborations, and debate. As in the case of Randle Reef, environmental decisions are often complex and multi-faceted and involve many stakeholders with competing (sometimes conflicting) priorities or objectives representing exactly the type of problem that humans are poorly equipped to solve unaided. When professionals encounter complex issues, they often attempt to use approaches that simplify the complexity so that they can manage the problem at hand. During this process, valuable information may be lost, opposite points of view may be ignored and elements of uncertainty may be overlooked. A systematic methodology that combines both quantitative and qualitative data from scientific or engineering studies of risk, cost, and benefit, as well as stakeholder objectives and values to rank project alternatives, has yet to be fully developed for contaminated sediment decision-making. The main goal of this Ph.D. research was to develop a Decision Support System (DSS) framework to aid the complex decision-making in sediment remediation. The proposed DSS framework incorporates the five key themes that, through research, were found to be the most relevant for sediment remediation projects. These themes are 1)participation of appropriate actors with common objectives; 2)funding and resources; 3)decision-making process; 4)research and technology development; and 5)public and political support. There was a need to gather relevant information and data from various sources to develop the required DSS framework. For this purpose, expert interviews were conducted, responses were collected through a public survey, Qualitative Document Analysis (QDA) was performed on available policy and research documents, and a review was undertaken of how other jurisdictions have employed DSS to aid their decision-making process. The final DSS framework has six key components as follows: 1)data module; 2)communication module; 3)document module; 4)knowledge module; 5)tools module; and 6)DSS optimization module. This generic framework can assist practitioners in developing more systematic and structured decisions for sediment remediation by incorporating an Integrated Information Management System (IIMS) along with a DSS optimization module. This IIMS+DSS method can aid the decision-making process by making it documented, reproducible, robust, transparent and provide a coherent framework to explore and analyze available alternatives in an attempt to reach the preferred solution promptly. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p dir="ltr">The importance of public input is increasingly recognized in the restoration of contaminated communities. Opening the decision-making process to the public allows for a wider representation of interests regarding changes being made to the community and is a vital component to successful restoration and revitalization. Over the last 50 years, the Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOCs) have undergone remediation and restoration of contaminated waterbodies and their surrounding area to improve environmental, social, and economic conditions. Though public input is typically sought out in these projects, it is common for many people and groups within a community to be uninvolved. As opportunities for community revitalization increase, it is important to understand the community’s role in this process. There is little understanding of what public participation looks like amongst AOCs; while many have successfully engaged with the community, others are still struggling to garner interest or involvement from their community. Our research examines community perceptions of revitalization, as well as the motivators and barriers in place for the public to be involved in the overall remediation, restoration, and revitalization framework using qualitative document analysis, interviews, and a survey instrument. Our results shed light on the importance of representation and trust in community participation and how revitalization is perceived by members of the community, as well as if revitalization indicators align with community interest in Great Lakes AOCs.</p>

Community members benefit from the opportunities and services that are provided by park and recreation departments. As technology has continued to improve, it has begun to influence some of the services and programs offered by park and recreation departments. This study presents information regarding World Wide Web use in parks and recreation departments in 1998. The study surveyed those park and recreation departments who were members of the National Recreation and Parks Association's Great Lakes Region in 1998. A total of 419 departments were included in the study. These 419 departments were grouped into three population categories (Under 15,000; 15,000-49,999; 50,000 and above). A survey return rate of 58% was achieved. Survey respondents were asked to list current and future uses of the World Wide Web in their departments by program and by activity. Respondents were also asked to identify why they were or were not using the web. The study also examined if there were differences between agency size and World Wide Web use, agency size and the number of computers used, and agency size and the number of computer specialists employed. Recreation professionals can use this study to identify whether their department would benefit from World Wide Web use. The information can assist in identifying strengths and weaknesses of the web in the recreation profession and in departments similar to their own. / School of Physical Education

This thesis starts by arguing that the civil conflicts that erupted in the African Great Lakes are rooted in a continuous pursuit of power, in which ethnic, regional and political identifiers are used by the contenders for power to rally community support. In an introductory chapter, I go back to the colonial era, drawing attention to Burundi and Rwanda, and then describe in more details Burundi's refugee crisis, ex-combatants' demobilization and the 2010 elections, all of which will be addressed in the subsequent chapters. <p><p>In the second chapter, entitled "On the Instrumental Power of Refugees: Household Composition and Civil War in Burundi", I study changes in household composition following household's exposure to civil war in Burundi. The analyses rely on a panel dataset collected in rural Burundi in 2005 and 2010. To address concerns over the endogenous distribution violence, I use an instrumental variables strategy using the distance to refugee camps, in which the Hutu rebellion was organized from the mid-1990s onwards. The analysis focuses on the impact of violence on demographic changes within households.<p><p>The third chapter, entitled "Who Benefited from Burundi's Demobilization Program?" and co-authored with Olivier Sterck (University of Oxford) and Philip Verwimp (ULB), assesses the impact of the demobilization cash transfers program, which took place from 2004 onwards in post-war Burundi. In the short run, we find that the cash payments had a positive impact on beneficiaries' consumption, non-food spending and investments. Importantly, it also generated positive spillovers on civilians in their home villages. However, both the direct impact and the spillovers seem to vanish in the long run. Ex-combatants' investments in assets were not productive enough to sustain their consumption pattern in the long run, as they ultimately ran out of demobilization money. <p><p>In the fourth chapter, entitled "From Rebellion to Electoral Violence. Evidence from Burundi" and co-authored with Andrea Colombo (ULB) and Olivier Sterck (University of Oxford), we aim at understanding the triggers of electoral violence in 2010, only a few months after the end of the war. We find that an acute polarization between ex-rebel groups -capturing the presence of groups with equal support - and political competition are both highly conducive to electoral violence. Disaggregating electoral violence by type, we show that these drivers explain different types of violence. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that ethnic diversity is not associated with electoral violence in post-conflict Burundi. <p><p>In the last chapter, entitled "Who Benefits from Customary Justice? Rent-seeking, Bribery and Criminality in sub-Saharan Africa" and co-authored with Olivier Sterck (University of Oxford), we have a closer look at the judicial system of Uganda, an important institution in a post-conflict economy. In many African countries, customary and statutory judicial systems co-exist. Customary justice is exercised by local courts and based on restorative principles, while statutory justice is mostly retributive and administered by magistrates' courts. As their jurisdiction often overlaps, victims can choose which judicial system to refer to, which may lead to contradictions between rules and inconsistencies in judgments. In this essay, we construct a model representing a dual judicial system and we show that this overlap encourages rent-seeking and bribery, and yields to high rates of petty crimes and civil disputes. <p><p>In Burundi, history has shown that instability in one country of the Great Lake region may destabilize the whole area, with dramatic effect on civilian population. Understanding the dynamics laying at the origin of violence, during and after civil conflict, is crucial to prevent violence relapse in any form, from petty criminality to larger scale combats. <p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

My doctoral thesis challenges the traditional paradigm of phosphorus (P) limitation of phytoplankton communities in freshwaters by suggesting colimitation of P, nitrogen (N), and iron (Fe) in Great Lakes. Oceanographers have recognized Fe, N and P colimitation, and biomass response to Fe is documented in freshwater lakes. I studied African and North American Great Lakes that are similar to large inland oceans. I discovered that Fe is a key nutrient that is often limiting in the offshore, and may explain the dominance of cyanobacteria in nutrient enriched lakes. I also discovered that the nearshore and offshore areas of these large lakes are very different, particularly when invasive dreissenid mussels are impacting the nearshore, as seen in the eastern basin of Lake Erie. As a result of the dreissenids, chlorophyll a (chla) concentrations are significantly lower in the nearshore of Lake Erie, but higher in the nearshore in the three African Great Lakes, as well as pre-dreissenid Lake Erie. The objective of my thesis was to determine the limiting nutrient(s) to the phytoplankton of the Great Lakes Erie, Malawi, Tanganyika, and Victoria in both the nearshore and offshore by measuring the physiological status of the phytoplankton. I also examined how dreissenids affect the distribution of seston and nutrient concentrations between the nearshore and offshore of the eastern basin of Lake Erie. My study design included temporal and spatial surveys in the nearshore and offshore of the four lakes, in which I used a variety of nutrient limitation indicators for P (C:P, N:P, P debt, APA, Fv/Fm), N (C:N, NH4 debt, NO3 debt, Fv/Fm), and Fe (Fv/Fm), as well as photosynthetic efficiency (Fv/Fm) experiments. Nutrient enrichment experiments were also conducted in the nearshore and offshore of the eastern basin of Lake Erie which involved the addition and removal of Fe alone, as well as in combination with P and/or N. Lake Erie nutrient enrichment experiments provided evidence for P, N and Fe colimitation where the addition of Fe with P relieved Fe and P limitation and allowed nitrate (NO3-) assimilation, alleviating N limitation. However, the offshore experiments indicated stronger Fe limitation than the nearshore experiment. Lower chla concentrations in the post-dreissenid nearshore of the eastern basin of Lake Erie may not be due entirely to lower phytoplankton biomass, as photoacclimation of the phytoplankton may also be occurring. Dreissenid grazing effects can be seen in the distribution of dissolved nutrient concentrations between the nearshore and offshore of post-dreissenid Erie. The African Great Lakes are threatened by expanding human populations, resulting in increased nutrient runoff; the consequences of which will depend on the limiting nutrient(s). I found that the nearshore regions of Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika were colimited by N and P, while the offshore regions were colimited by N, P and Fe. The nearshore of Lake Victoria was colimited by light and N, while the offshore was colimited by N, P and Fe. Fe limitation only occurs in the offshore, and positive, significant relationships were found between total dissolved Fe concentrations and cyanobacteria. Continued P and Fe loading to the lakes will create a higher N demand that will result in a shift to N2-fixing cyanobacteria, which has serious consequences to human and ecosystem health as they are a poor nutritive food source and some are potentially toxigenic. The majority of studies conducted on Great Lakes involve offshore sampling, however, the less understood nearshore is where human impacts and activities are concentrated. I discovered there are significant differences between the nearshore and offshore, which has implications for water quality monitoring.