CEI and its collaborators launched the Lake Ontario Coastal Initiative (LOCI) in 2002. Those involved with LOCI worked with Lake Ontario coastal communities, agencies and citizens to build greater public participation, individual responsibility and an understanding of how their communities contribute to water quality impairment and how to fix it.

Research was conducted to better understand the extent and nature of the impairments, thus ensuring that remediation would be done cost-effectively. This initiative led to CEI’s work in developing methods to quantify levels of pollutants in local streams, understanding the sources of those pollutants and recommending actions to restore those streams to acceptable water quality standards.

A major part of that work involved water quality monitoring (2003 through 2009) to establish the degree of impairment of each of the 19 tributaries and embayments along New York’s Lake Ontario shoreline from the Niagara River to the St. Lawrence River. The results of that monitoring are provided below in two forms: Learning Pages and Short Report. The Learning Pages are two-page, high-level summaries of the water quality data collected. The Short Reports are seven-page descriptions of the data collected and some discussion of the data itself.