Program

Thursday, March 17

All times are Eastern Daylight Time

Registration Check-in - Networking - Exhibits | 7:15 a.m. Coffee and tea available

Welcome | 8:15–8:45 a.m. Max Herzog Cleveland Water Alliance Justin M. Bibb Mayor, City of Cleveland

Concurrent Sessions | 8:45 a.m.–12:15 10:15–10:30 a.m. - Break | Exhibits open | Snacks available Superior A A systems view of Lake Erie Biogeochemistry | 8:45 Chairs: Brice Grunert, Fasong Yuan Lake Erie Field Year 2019 results–Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI) | 9:45 Chairs: Kristen Fussell, Christopher Winslow, Paris Collingsworth Veterans CD Living Lab Ontario–part of the Canadian Agroecosystem Living Laboratories network | 8:45 Chairs: Pamela Joosse, Chris Parsons Lake Erie Literacy and Education | 9:45 Chairs: Lyndsey Manzo, Kristin TePas, Angela Greene Community Science and Outreach | 11:00 Chair: Amy B. Alford Superior B Building a Lake Erie monitoring program to inform biological condition | 8:45 Chairs: Douglas Kane, James Watkins, Lyubov Burlakova

Buffet Lunch / Exhibits | 12:15–1 p.m.

Plenary | 1–2 p.m. Plenary: The Cuyahoga River: From Flame to Fame Bill Zawiski Water Quality Group Supervisor, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency Wrap-Up Ed Verhamme Past President, International Association for Great Lakes Research Closing Henry Lickers Canadian Commissioner, International Joint Commission Haudenosaunee citizen of the Seneca Nation, Turtle Clan.

Concurrent Sessions | 2–6 p.m. 3:45–4 p.m. - Break | Exhibits open | Snacks available Superior A CSMI, cont'd | 2:00 Chairs: Kristen Fussell, Christopher Winslow, Paris Collingsworth Veterans CD Community Science and Outreach, cont'd | 2:00 Chair: Amy B. Alford Agricultural practices and water quality | 4:00 Chairs: Khandakar R. Islam, Arif Rahman Superior B Building a Lake Erie monitoring program, cont'd | 2:00 Chairs: Douglas Kane, James Watkins, Lyubov Burlakova Designing and evaluating wetlands to optimize environmental and ecological benefits | 2:45 Chairs: Lauren Kinsman-Costello, Janice Kerns, Laura Johnson

On Demand

Virtual Field Trip

The State of Lake Erie 4,000 years ago- geological & archaeological evidence

Francine McCarthy, Nick Riddick, and John Ross Macdonald, Brock University

The mean level of Lake Erie was approximately 4 meters higher around 4,000 years ago, as drainage from the Upper Great Lakes was transferred to the St. Clair–Detroit Rivers from the earlier Mattawa–Ottawa River outlet. Indigenous inhabitants of coastal Lake Erie would have benefitted from extensive wetlands with agitated water that were ideal environments for wild rice during this ‘Nipissing Flood’ event that spanned several centuries around the Middle-Late Holocene boundary. Harvesting this resource was presumably the raison d'être of the Fitzgerald Site, associated with “Non-Meadowood Early Woodland” artifacts (Parker, 1997). This unassuming site is approximately 7 meters above the modern level of Lake Erie and ca. ½ kilometer from the modern shoreline on the Haldimand Clay Plain. The Early Woodland site would have been on the northeastern shore of a much larger paleo-Cates Creek embayment when abundant plant macrofossils and pollen of this cereal grass were found in sediments dated around 4,800–3,700 calibrated years ago (Pengelly et al., 1997).

This virtual tour will examine evidence of occupation of the Fitzgerald Site and questions archaeological estimates of its age, since it would have been far from the Lake Erie shoreline following the sharp decline in lake level attributed to erosion of the Lyell/Johnson Sill around 2,900 years ago. Extensive wild rice-hosting wetlands had long disappeared from this region by the latest reported dates for Early Woodland lithic assemblages, suggesting that this culture extends nearly a millennium earlier than previously thought (MacDonald et al., this conference).