A member of the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Science Advisory Board will discuss emerging issues concerning water quality in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River when he presents the next Cazenovia Forum lecture Friday, Oct. 6, at 7 pm at the Catherine Cummings Theatre in Cazenovia.Michael Twiss, who is also Professor of Biology and Director of the Great Rivers Center at Clarkson University in Potsdam, will discuss the status of research on Great Lakes ecosystems in a presentation entitled What would an Early Warning System look like for the Great Lakes?
Admission is free, no reservations are required and audience members are invited to join the speaker for a post-event reception. The Forum is pleased to have the Cazenovia Lake Association as a sponsor for this event.
The International Joint Commission, established more than a century ago under the Boundary Waters Treaty and made up of government-appointed representatives from the United States and Canada, has a mandate to provide proactive identification of emerging issues concerning water quality in the Great Lakes region, which is home to 35 million people and a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. Twiss will discuss the IJC Science Advisory Board’s current work developing advice and recommendations to Canadian and U.S. governments on existing and emerging stressors and threats to water quality in the lakes. He plans to outline the need for an early warning system to address these issues and solicit audience input.
As director of the Great Rivers Center at Clarkson, Twiss is involved in the REASON Project, which is using a network of water quality sensors to understand how water level regulation schemes influence and impact water quality, pollution tracking and fish migration.
Twiss grew up in Canada and began his work at Clarkson after a brief tenure at Ryerson University and a post-doctoral fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He has focused his career on the Great Lakes and has published fieldwork on each of the Great Lakes and on the Saint Lawrence River. His current research is focused on winter limnology as well as the development of novel approaches to year-round remote sensing of water quality.
In addition to his work on the IJC Science Advisory Board, he is a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Great Lakes Advisory Board Science and Information Subcommittee, and the vice president and president-elect of the International Association for Great Lakes Research.