Citizen scientists for large-scale water quality testing in the Great Lakes: Metabarcoding Microbes

Session: 17. - Great Lakes Outreach and Education

Subba Rao Chaganti, University of Windsor, [email protected]
Daniel Heath, Great Leaks Environmental Research Institute, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, [email protected]
Abdolrazagh Hashemi Shahraki, Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER), University of Windsor, [email protected]

Abstract

During the summer of 2017, an outreach and education program was organized to recruit and train citizen scientists to assess the microbial communities in Great Lakes waters around Essex County.  In that program, hundreds of citizen scientists participated by collecting water samples from the shores of the lakes and tributaries around Essex County. Collected water samples were characterized for microbial community composition using metabarcoding of the 16S rDNA gene and Next Generation Sequencing. This presentation will focus on  1) Economic and social impacts of aquatic microbial contamination (e.g., beach closures), 2) Limitations in current recreational water monitoring protocols, 3) Outreach programs, training and data collection from the citizen scientist, and 4) Pathogen detection in the water samples collected by the citizen scientist. This project resulted in a massive simultaneous assessment of microbial composition across over 15 km of shoreline, perhaps one of the most spatial comprehensive microbial community surveys ever completed in fresh water.

1. Keyword
public education

2. Keyword
Great Lakes basin

3. Keyword
monitoring

4. Additional Keyword
Genomics