Two Wisconsin Sea Grant outreach specialists are tackling projects that will help communities up and down Great Lakes coasts adapt to what is coming -- climate change.

Margaret Mooney, UW-Madison, (608) 265-2123,margaret.mooney@ssec.wisc.edu

Jean Phillips, UW-Madison, (608) 262-8164, jeanp@ssec.wisc.edu

Scientists, educators, decision makers and the general public turn to various sources for climate information. Investigators will conduct a literature review to determine the types of information sources. Guided by those findings, researchers will then design an evaluation tool and apply it to plumb the perceptions of the NOAA Climate Services Portal. Funding source: supplemental grant from the NOAA Sea Grant Office. A/AS-65

Val Klump, UW-Milwaukee, (414) 382-1700, vklump@uwm.edu

The Great Lakes have experienced arguably the largest short-term ecological shift in their history within the last decade and face a long-term climate shift in the decades to come. The invasion of Dreissenid mussels, the disappearance of Diporeia, and the predicted increasing temperatures and lengthening stratification have altered and will alter the role of benthic metabolism. The nearshore habitat is a complex of newly colonized cobble, gravel, hard clay and silty sands. Deepwater  bottoms have been overrun with mussels. Production and respiration of oxygenare notoriously difficult to measure in such environments since many of the common methods — oxygen and pore water gradients, sediment or chamber incubations — all have limitations. The researchers propose to employ new, nondisruptive eddy correlation techniques to study oxygen exchange at the benthic boundary in a range of Great Lakes environments that have undergone or will undergo significant change. R/HCE-12