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Book Review
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review by
Douglas Knauer
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
Research Center
1350 Femrite Drive
Monona, Wisconsin 53716-3736
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from Limnology and Oceanography 44(2) 1999, p. 476
Effler, S. W. [ED.]. 1996. Limnological and engineering analysis of a polluted urban lake: Prelude to environmental management of Onondaga Lake, New York. Springer. 856 p. $99.95 ISBN 0-387-94383-8.
This book chronicles the extreme ecological insults that Lake Onondaga has endured. It should be required reading by anyone concerned with how multiple stresses affect aquatic ecosystems. I have been actively involved in lake restoration for almost three decades. Until I read this book, I thought that I had seen lakes that traversed the entire continuum of polluted waters in North America. But I was humbled by what I read and am indeed one of those who Steven Effler, the editor of this volume, notes "...will be surprised, if not shocked, that there is a lake in the United States that remains as profoundly degraded as Onondaga Lake."
The introductory chapter by Steven Effler and Gena Harnett sets the stage for the book: It describes the lake's morphometry and watershed and summarizes pollutant loadings and the lake's responses. Onondaga Lake has a surface area of 12 km2, a mean depth of 10.9 m , and a maximum depth of 19.5 m. Syracuse, New York, is located within the watershed boundary. Some consequences of this unhappy juxtaposition are: By the late 1890s, the lake had lost its commercially valuable cold-water fisheries; ice harvesting was banned (for health reasons) in 1900; swimming was banned in 1940; and fishing was banned in 1970.
Chapters 2-8 deal with each of the major disciplines necessary to understand the ecological dynamics of Onondaga Lake. Chapters 2 and 3 detail the geology and hydrogeology of the watershed and surface water loadings to the lake. Chapter 4 describes physical processes that occur within the lake; this includes an interesting discussion of tributary inflow and chemical density gradients that cause the tributary water and associated chemical loads to settle into the deeper waters of the lake. Chapter 5 deals with lake chemistry, including the usual variables (dissolved oxygen, phosphorus, and nitrogen), as well as more specialized information, e.g., mercury (albeit only total mercury). Chapter 6 is devoted to the lake's biology: from microbiology through phytoplankton up the food web to fish. Chapter 7 ("Optics") presents a variety of optic data: Secchi disk measurements taken since 1968 as well as measurements made with quantum sensors. Chapter 8 characterizes the sediments and fluxes of chemicals from them; the highlight here is that elevated mercury concentrations in the sediments result from inputs from the chloralkali operations in the watershed.
The final chapters ("Mechanistic Modeling of Water Quality in Onondaga Lake" and "Synthesis and Perspectives") summarize the salient points from the other chapters and exercise a user-friendly management model to investigate how the lake might respond to different watershed management alternatives. The authors also reflect on practical issues that must be considered in lake restoration, e.g., who will pay and is it worth it?
The book is an interdisciplinary effort to describe how extreme anthropogenic perturbations affect a particular aquatic ecosystem. As I read about the many industrial and municipal discharges and their effects on Onondaga Lake, I felt rage that this was allowed to happen. The book is highly recommended to anyone who must deal in either the hard science of lake restoration or the social science of how to respond to wholesale environmental pollution.
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