Publications

Objective The Northern Refuge of Lake Michigan was established under the auspices of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission in 1985 as an additional step toward restoring a self‐sustaining Lake Trout Salvelinus namaycush population to the lake. The overall goal of our study was to assess progress toward Lake Trout rehabilitation in the Northern Refuge through 2021. Methods We conducted...

Objective

Objective

The recently developed approach to estimating the instantaneous total mortality of coded-wire-tagged lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) is generally applicable to catch-at-age data. We further formalized the technique to objectively incorporate the year-class and year effects into the model structure of catch-curve regression. We used this new method to compare adult mortality and year...

Lake Sturgeon Acipenser fulvescens are listed as threatened or endangered in 15 states or provinces within their native range. Accordingly, investments in habitat and population restoration for this species have increased throughout the Great Lakes. To aide evaluation of restoration efficacy, robust population parameters are needed to inform management decisions. The St. Clair – Detroit...

The Lake Ontario cisco Coregonus artedi population declined in the 20th century, and restoration of this species is a management objective. Management tools to restore cisco are limited because little is known about cisco spawning behavior and habitat use. We tagged 76 cisco from a remnant population in Chaumont Bay, Lake Ontario with acoustic transmitters and characterized seasonal...

In some cases, managing an established invasive species may do more harm to an ecosystem than allowing the invader to persist. Given limited resources available to land managers and the realities of conservation triage, we recognized the need for systematic guidance for management decisions made at the “late end” of the invasion curve. We gathered an interdisciplinary group of experts...

How to identify the drivers of population connectivity remains a fundamental question in ecology and evolution. Answering this question can be challenging in aquatic environments where dynamic lake and ocean currents coupled with high levels of dispersal and gene flow can decrease the utility of modern population genetic tools. To address this challenge, we used RAD-Seq to genotype 959...

Evaluating population trends in dynamic estuarine environments can be challenging, especially when survey data include a high percentage of zero observations. In fishery-independent surveys, zeros that come from reduced susceptibility to sample gears and reduced availability of the population to the survey impact survey catchability and negatively bias relative abundance indices. A zero...

Science-based conservation of riverine fishes can be best targeted with specific information about spatial-ecological controls on the community, including anthropogenic stressors. Because anthropogenic stressors can originate at multiple spatial scales, we investigated the influence of natural and anthropogenic variables summarized within the reach, valley, and catchment on fish...

Biodiversity is responsible for important ecological processes like productivity and ecosystem stability, and rare species are a major component of biodiversity. Rarity increases a species' vulnerability to disturbances and also makes them difficult to study. Globally, species of freshwater systems are some of the most threatened, and evaluation of rare freshwater species and their...

The establishment of invasive dreissenid mussels Dreissena polymorpha and Dreissena rostriformis bugensis in the Laurentian Great Lakes has affected multiple aspects of the ecosystem. However, the effects of their larvae (veligers) on lower trophic levels are relatively unknown. Previous research has documented that some larval fishes consume veligers, but it is unclear if they select...