Alicia Burtner

I am looking at the water quality of Lake Tai, a large, eutrophic lake.  The lake's watershed is one of the fasted developing areas in China, and the lake was supplying drinking water to over 30 million people.  Unfortunately, it has become very nutrient-polluted, and toxic algal blooms have intensified over the
years.  The city of Wuxi lost their water supply for 2 weeks as a result of this.  They now extract water from the Yangtze River, where our own Dr. Curt Richardson once found a dead body, or rely on bottled water rather than cleaning up the river.  One of the main barriers to cleaning the river is that no one can seem to agree on the main cause of the pollution.  Various papers cite agriculture, industry, untreated waste water, or naturally occurring sediments as being the big polluters.  I will be spending my summer taking water samples at the 172 inflows to the lake and using ArcGIS to try to associate land use (agriculture, industry, urban) with the types and levels of pollution.