Publications

Since 1978, the Lake Ontario benthic preyfish survey has provided information on the status and trends of the benthic preyfish community related to Lake Ontario Fish Community Objectives that include understanding preyfish population dynamics and community diversity. Beginning in 2015, the benthic preyfish survey expanded from US-only to incorporate lake-wide sampling sites which...

Plants naturally carry microbes on seeds and within seeds that may facilitate development and early survival of seedlings. Some crops have lost seed-vectored microbes in the process of domestication or during seed storage and seed treatment. Biostimulant microbes from wild plants were used by pre-modern cultures to re-acquire beneficial seed microbes. Today some companies have developed...

Rapids habitats are critical spawning and nursery grounds for multiple Laurentian Great Lakes fishes of ecological importance such as lake sturgeon, walleye, and salmonids. However, river modifications have destroyed important rapids habitat in connecting channels by modifying flow profiles and removing large quantities of cobble and gravel that are preferred spawning substrates of...

Shallow water riparian zones of large rivers provide important habitat for fishes, but anthropogenic influences have reduced the availability and quality of these habitats. In the St. Clair–Detroit River System, a Laurentian Great Lakes connecting channel, losses of riparian habitat contributed to impairment of fish populations and their habitats. We conducted a seine survey annually...

This report presents biomass-based summaries of fish communities in the West Basin of Lake Erie derived from USGS bottom trawl surveys conducted from 2013 to 2020 during June and September. The survey design provided temporal and spatial coverage that did not exist in the interagency trawl database, and thus complemented the August ODNR-OMNRF effort to reinforce stock assessments with...

Lakewide acoustic (AC) and bottom trawl (BT) surveys are conducted annually to generate indices of pelagic and benthic prey fish densities in Lake Michigan. The BT survey had been conducted each fall from 1973 through 2019 using 12-m trawls at depths ranging from 9 to 110 m and included 70 fixed locations distributed across seven transects; this survey estimates densities of seven prey...

A disconnect between scientific research and environmental management communities can be a detriment to both. In the case of Great Lakes coastal ecosystems, which are inherently complex and subject to uncertain effects of future climatic, environmental, and anthropogenic drivers, greater collaboration could be beneficial to their sustainability. We capture the challenges and...

Impacts of dreissenid mussels (Dreissena spp.) on Great Lakes ecosystems are well documented, and a better understanding of mechanisms that cause variation in dreissenid abundance is needed. An outstanding question is how much dreissenid biomass is consumed by fish predation. A significant difficulty for investigating dreissenid consumption by fish is that dreissenids in stomachs are...

The St. Clair and Detroit rivers historically supported abundant fish populations. However, like many river systems, these rivers have been greatly altered through the creation of navigation channels and other anthropogenic disturbances, resulting in the loss of fish and wildlife habitat and declines in native fish populations. To ameliorate this environmental degradation, artificial...

Ecosystem-based management relies on understanding how perturbations influence ecosystem structure and function (e.g., invasive species, exploitation, abiotic changes). However, data on unimpacted systems are scarce; therefore, we often rely on impacted systems to make inferences about ‘natural states.’ Among the Laurentian Great Lakes, Lake Superior provides a unique case study to...

Higher spatial and temporal resolutions of remote sensing data are likely to be useful for ecological monitoring efforts. There are many different treatment approaches for the introduced European genotype of Phragmites australis, and adaptive management principles are being integrated in at least some long-term monitoring efforts. In this paper, we investigated how natural color and a...

Invasive sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) populations in the Laurentian Great Lakes have been reduced by up to 90% through the use of selective pesticides (lampricides) and physical sea lamprey barriers that block spawning migrations. Nevertheless, other control methods are needed to achieve integrated pest management objectives, delay biological resistance, and address societal pressure...