Publications

River restoration programmes with the goal of conserving and rehabilitating inland fishes have a multi-decadal history, but evaluation and synthesis of past restoration actions have been limited by a lack of monitoring and reporting. Given that calls for both monitoring and systematic reviews of restoration have increased, we were interested in the influence that restoration has had on...

Grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella) are non-indigenous to North America having been translocated to the United States in the 1960s as a potential non-chemical solution for nuisance aquatic vegetation. Reproductively viable grass carp now exist in many watersheds in the United States. In the Great Lakes basin, grass carp were first discovered in the 1980s with direct confirmation of...

Control of invasive grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella) populations in the Western Lake Erie Basin merits adaptive management guided by the best available science. Presently (2024), capture of mature grass carp in rivers during spawning season is most efficient, so knowing when and where grass carp are spawning is essential information for natural resource agencies. Using bidirectional...

Mapping benthic habitats with bathymetric, acoustic, and spectral data requires georeferenced ground-truth information about habitat types and characteristics. New technologies like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) collect tens of thousands of images per mission making image-based ground truthing particularly attractive. Two types of machine learning (ML) models, random forest (RF)...

Science is fundamental to sound policies, particularly when it comes to implementing an Ecosystem Approach. Science can and should inform nearly all facets of an Ecosystem Approach, yet challenges remain to realizing this goal. To help identify and better understand these challenges we used a qualitative comparative case study approach to identify and characterize the challenges and...

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

Over the past centuries, coregonines have been exposed to a range of stressors that have led to extinctions, extirpations, and speciation reversals. Given that some populations remain at risk and fishery managers have begun restoring coregonines where they have been extirpated, we reviewed the primary and gray literature to describe the diversity of coregonine restoration or conservation...

We investigated wetland vegetation before, during, and after dike construction at the Metzger Marsh project in western Lake Erie, which was designed to restore a 300-ha wetland that had been degraded following the loss of a protective barrier beach. A dike was constructed in 1995 to replace the function of the eroded barrier beach, but it contained a water-control structure to allow...

Introduction Invasive species research within the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Ecosystems Mission Area focuses on invasive plants, animals, and pathogens throughout the United States. USGS scientists provide science support to help solve the problems posed by these nonnative species while working with partners in the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), other Federal, State, and...

Olfactory-mediated behaviors in fish are often examined in artificial microcosms that enable well-controlled treatments but fail to replicate environmental and social contexts. However, observing these behaviors in nature poses challenges. Here, we describe a protocol for recording sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) behaviors in a natural system. We describe steps for administering and...

Grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella, Val.) is an invasive species in the Laurentian Great Lakes region with the potential for damaging the lake ecosystem and harming the region's economy. Grass carp spawning was documented in the Sandusky River, Ohio, in 2015 through targeted egg sampling. Continued egg sampling in the Sandusky River suggested that grass carp spawning is related to...

Conservation aquaculture provides a means for promoting environmental stewardship, useful both in the context of restoring native species and limiting the production of invasive species. Aquaculture of lampreys is a relatively recent endeavor aimed primarily at producing animals to support the restoration of declining native populations. However, in the Laurentian Great Lakes, where sea...