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A new report analyzes how multiple stressors impact the Great Lakes

NASA Goddard Photo and Video

As the Great Lakes face stressors from climate change to habitat loss to invasive species a new report is trying to make sense of how those different stressors interact.

Scientists say in the past individual stressors have often been treated as “silos” - individual problems unconnected to one another.

Now, Dr. Don Uzarski, a Central Michigan University researcher who worked on the report, said scientists are trying to understand how different stressors interact.

“You never get a single human disturbance taking place at one time. It’s always multiple stressors,” he said. “So the question becomes how do these multiple stressors interact?”

Uzarski said understanding how stressors interact will help in identifying the best ways to help the lakes.

“We really have to understand these interactions. Otherwise, we could be fighting in too many directions and not really knowing the true outcome of these interacting stressors,” he said. “We first have to understand how they’re reacting to each other.”

Uzarski said many stressors - such as algal blooms and climate change - are “synergistic” - meaning together they make a problem worse.

But, occasionally, he said different stressors can cancel each other out.