Processes Within Lake Erie

The current level of knowledge concerning Lake Erie is inadequate for the development of a predictive model of the system. Nevertheless, an outline of the submodels required for the development of a predictive model is presented. Further, as a result of many recent studies, the level of understanding of the Lake Erie system has increased immensely and major gaps in the present knowledge of the lake have been identified; useful areas for future research have been indicated. Many of the recent studies on Lake Erie are included in this special issue. The results of these investigations have been summarized and linked together where possible, to describe the lake and give an overview of the more important processes in Lake Erie.