Publications

Lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) populations in the upper Great Lakes have undergone declines in the past two decades, particularly in Lakes Michigan and Huron. However, cisco (Coregonus artedi) are recovering in parts of the Great Lakes. Population declines are hypothesized to be due, in part, to reduced zooplankton prey in areas that serve as critical habitat for larval...

Objective Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding provides an attractive option for monitoring biodiversity in remote freshwater ecosystems, where the deployment of conventional gears encounters major logistical constraints. We evaluated eDNA metabarcoding for monitoring fish communities and early detection of nonnative species in three remote lakes on Isle Royale, Michigan, USA. Methods...

Characterizing fish movements is required for understanding habitat use, energy flow, and trophic structure and can inform fisheries management. Drowned river mouth (DRM) lakes are productive inland habitats in the Laurentian Great Lakes basin used by migratory fishes. Despite recognition of their ecological connections to the Great Lakes, the value of DRM lakes as seasonal habitats is...

In recent years, Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) has gained significant attention in the geoscience and remote sensing community for its potential to improve the resolution of low-quality underwater imagery. This paper introduces MIMAR-Net ( Multiscale Inception-based Manhattan Attention Residual Network), a new deep learning architecture designed to increase the spatial resolution...

Background Cisco (Coregonus artedi) were historically abundant throughout Lake Huron, including Saginaw Bay, but only a few remnant populations remain in northern Lake Huron today. Reestablishment of cisco is an important component of management plans to restore sustainable fisheries in Lake Huron. Cisco restoration efforts have focused on the release of hatchery-reared fish, but the...

Background Characterizing the diversity of migration behaviors from the individual to the population level is essential for understanding how organisms respond to environmental variation and how these responses affect survival and habitat use. Lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens) is a species of special concern in the Laurentian Great Lakes that are long-lived and generally classified as

Background For migratory fishes, habitat selection in dimensions of temperature and depth may be jointly used to define the bathythermal niche. Seasonal and long-term changes in the availability of bathythermal habitat can cause behavioral responses that have consequences for managing interjurisdictional fisheries that target migratory fishes. Management of such fisheries typically...

Mysis diluviana is a macroinvertebrate that couples benthic and pelagic habitats on a daily timescale through diel vertical migration (DVM). However, quantifying how much Mysis biomass is exchanged between benthic and pelagic habitats at an ecosystem scale is difficult because of sampling limitations and variability in Mysis DVM behavior related to light and depth. Although Mysis are...

Light regulates the vertical migration of many aquatic organisms. Mysis species couple pelagic and benthic habitats in lakes by diel vertical migrations (DVM), transporting energy and nutrients through the water column and food web. Although Mysis are generally assumed to remain on the bottom during the day, some have been observed in the pelagic zone during the day, indicating...

Ambient stream water temperatures affect salmonid movement and survival with fish actively seeking thermal refugia from warming waters. This study sought to investigate the potential role of water temperature in the perceived decline in native Brook Trout Salvelinus fontinalis and non-native Brown Trout Salmo trutta populations in the North Branch Au Sable River by fishers and reported...

Year-round records of thermal stratification in the Great Lakes are rare, and there are few observations of thermal stratification during winter. In this paper, we analyze temperature data from 13 temperature logger chains and from over 130 benthic acoustic receivers that were deployed across Lake Ontario for 2 yr. The timing and duration of the fall overturn correlate with the local...

Objective The potential for environmental DNA (eDNA) to disperse widely from source organisms enables high detection efficiency but raises questions about eDNA's ability to differentiate fine-scale spatial patterns relative to conventional fish capture data.Methods We evaluate these questions in the St. Louis River estuary—a hydrologically and spatially complex coastal system within Lake...