Major Goals and Objectives

The objective of this work is to characterize microbial metabolism across a gradient of impacted sites in southwest Lake Michigan, spanning NE Illinois to NW Indiana.

While microbes tend to alter their environments as ecosystem engineers, their existence is a function of their environment. Any organism has a range of conditions it can tolerate; aquatic microbes and their metabolisms are generally dependent on temperature, pH, light, and resource availability. Humans also tend to significantly alter our environment, and we have shown the ability to cause change much faster than microbes. Our increase of the planet’s temperature through greenhouse gas emissions will increase water temperatures and further reduce ice cover over the coming decades. On a finer scale, industrial practices emit pollutants into the coastal air, soil, sediments, and waters. The effects of these actions, prevalent in southwest Lake Michigan,
are poorly understood and disproportionately felt by low-income and minority communities.