Transportation Infrastructure and Ecosystem Resilience to Climate Change in the Great Lakes

Abstract

This paper provides a review of Great Lakes ecosystem and transportation infrastructure resilience to climate change, specifically climate change-induced water-level declines. We synthesize existing understanding of historic and projected water-level variability on the Great Lakes, and survey resilience research on the Great Lakes ecosystem using lake eutrophication as a case study and on transportation infrastructure for freight shipping. From the review knowledge, gaps in the literature are identified. By comparing the resilience of lake ecosystems with transportation infrastructure, we further propose an integrated framework that unifies resilience of both. The integrated framework is important to the design of coordinated mitigation strategies for enhancing the overall resilience in the Great Lakes region.