WRI Interns 2023

Flooding in New York State is widespread, frequent, and costly. In the last five years, coastal communities along Lake Ontario experienced two record-setting flooding events costing millions of dollars in damage. Implementing land use regulations to restrict risky development and reduce flood damage is an effective method to increase community flood resilience. However, many municipalities lack adequate capacity, resources, or political will to adopt the necessary ordinances. Focusing on two communities in Wayne County, this project compares existing land use ordinances with the community’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Program (LWRP) goals and priorities to see if local ordinances are supporting the implementation of existing comprehensive plans. Knowing what measures are appropriate, how many of those are currently being implemented, and where efforts are lacking, would help decision-makers at higher levels of government provide informational and policy support where it is most needed. The framework for the review was created by previous WRI intern Andrew Epps and staff members Rewa Phansalkar and Kristen Hychka. The framework was flushed out and re-structured as a scorecard to allow communities to start to rank themselves against other communities on how well they are achieving their waterfront goals. The scorecard allows communities to analyze and compare how land use ordinances are addressing waterfront resilience and identify gaps for improvement. Preliminary findings after a review of Sodus Point and Huron indicate that local ordinances are not as strong as they should be to support the plans and priorities regarding waterfront development and flood protection outlined in existing comprehensive plans. While this initial review only compares two communities, as further communities are reviewed it will allow for a greater picture of how resilient communities are across NY and what barriers to coastal adaptation planning exist along the Lake Ontario shoreline.

The 2023 Great Lakes Action Agenda (GLAA) proposes six distinct sustainability and resiliency goals to be met within ten years of implementation. During this internship, we focus on Goals 1 and 5. Goal 1 involves measuring toxins in the Great Lakes, identifying their sources, and researching remediation options. Our contribution to Goal 1 was writing a literature review concerning the application of phytoremediation methods to remove mercury from Great Lakes ecosystems. Goal 5 revolves around enhancing coastal resiliency, necessitating both site-specific community-level analysis and theoretical scientific rigor to optimize coastal resiliency interventions. Of interest are ways in which novel shoreline management methods can aid in attenuating waves and decreasing erosion. Our contribution to Goal 5 was the completion of a review of the science behind nature-based solutions centering on vegetation and their potential for wave attenuation and erosion control. We found that such solutions require rigorous, updated data that elucidates relationships between environmental, social, and economic conditions on the NYS shorelines. We also conducted a study of relationships between census-based demographic data and NOAA 2019 hardened shoreline data for Lake Ontario. Using linear regression in Excel and R, we found possible positive correlation between a municipality’s income and the percentage of engineered shorelines that are poorly engineered. A summary of findings from this study, including a breakdown of shoreline types throughout the NYS Great Lakes, are collected in a WRI Factsheet on hardened shorelines in NYS.

Potential sources of mercury to Lake Ontario are of interest to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation and various management entities due to new water level management strategies outlined in Plan 2014 and ongoing wetland restoration efforts along the shoreline. Mercury is a ubiquitous contaminant that is highly toxic to humans, and is often consumed through eating contaminated fish. This project focused on measuring mercury from sediment, wetland sites, and Cladophora alga to determine whether these sites have elevated mercury and inform restoration and fishing management along the Lake Ontario shoreline. A sub question to this hypothesis is comparing restored and unrestored wetlands to determine whether shoreline restoration efforts are affecting mercury availability. We sought to test our hypothesis by conducting fieldwork to collect sediment, cattail detritus, and Cladophora samples. Although results are not yet available, we expect that wetland and Cladophora sites will have elevated levels of total and methylmercury compared to sediment sites (our control) as suggested by existing literature. If our hypothesis is supported by the results, this project could have implications on water level, ecological, nutrient, and fish management in Lake Ontario.

Lead in NYS Public Schools

Lead-containing pipes and other lead-containing plumbing fixtures were commonly used in public water systems in the United States, but their usage was banned in 1986 after the passing of the Clean Water Act (USEPA, 1989). The reason for that is that even at low levels, lead can be a powerful neurotoxin that can have harmful effects, particularly for infants and children. Despite this ban, pre-existing water infrastructure continues to be a major contributor to lead in drinking water, a major public health issue. In 2016, New York State (NYS) took a proactive step of requiring lead testing of public school drinking water every five years and set an action level of 15 ppb (NYS Senate 2016 a, b). Previous WRI interns have analyzed the prevalence of lead in NYS public schools from the 2016 compliance year and this project is its continuation which investigates the 2020 dataset. During this internship, both datasets were analyzed to examine the differences between compliance years, look for statistical significance, and map prevalence of lead in 2020. The results we found were that lead continues to be a major issue as of 2020 with contamination worsening in some areas, that NYS presented with low change from 2016 to 2020 in most areas, and that there was no statistical significance between our chosen demographics and likelihood of lead contamination.