GLRI partners in Lake Superior's "Year of Intense Monitoring"

 

By Tim Funk, GLIFWC GLRI Coordinator

 

     Odanah, Wis.—Lake Superior is the focus of 2011’s Year of Intensive Monitoring, and GLIFWC is a partner in one of the priority monitoring projects: the monitoring of juvenile namé (lake sturgeon).
      As reported in the Winter ‘10/’11 issue of Mazina’igan, lake sturgeon are a State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference (SOLEC) indicator species, as they require healthy near shore and tributary habitat to thrive and reproduce. They are listed as a species of special concern in the United States, where they are located in six tributaries, of which only two have self-sustaining populations, the Bad and Sturgeon Rivers.
      Overall, Lake Superior is the site of 22 current or extirpated populations of lake sturgeon, and these provide target areas to be sampled by a workgroup comprised of about a dozen teams of state, federal, provincial and tribal biologists, including GLIFWC’s Bill Mattes. The goals of this effort are to: describe current lake widestatus of juvenile sturgeon; establish an index of relative abundance (recruitment, cohort strength, population trends); and to compare biological characteristics among and within sampling locations.
      At any given site, intensive sturgeon sampling will occur over a period of about a week, using 1,000 feet of 6-foot high monofilament nets intended to catch sturgeon aged 3 to 15 years at points from 0 to 10 km from the mouth of tributaries.
      Examples of other “Year of Intensive Monitoring” projects around Lake Superior in 2011 include the study of the lower trophic food web, with at least one study specific to a small organism on which fish feed known as mysis; obtaining baseline line water quality data in tributaries with proposed mining activity; and nearshore watershed monitoring of various species of herptiles, including turtles, frogs, and salamanders. GLIFWC science and technical staff are involved in implementing or cooperating with portions of these projects.
      Gauging the health of the Great Lakes is a task nearly as gargantuan as the Lakes themselves. Thanks to the ongoing work of the Lakewide Management Plans (LaMPs) and a relatively new Coordinated Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI), even more governments, agencies, educational institutions, and others are involved in bringing together their skills, interests, and resources to study and manage the lakes, each of which has a unique set of traits and challenges.
      The effort is being directed through the Binational Executive Committee, a body of senior-level representatives of Canadian and U.S. federal, state, provincial, and tribal agencies purposed with implementing the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.
      A process was thus begun for coordinated science and monitoring to occur on a multi-year rotational cycle for lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior.
      At each cycle, the process begins with the Lakewide Management Planning groups for each great lake working to identify key research priorities for that lake. The LaMP groups coordinate with other established binational committees and interdisciplinary groups of experts on major topics—such as toxics (Binational Toxics Strategy), fisheries (Great Lakes Fisheries Commission), or ecosystems (SOLEC).
      These priorities are then forwarded to a science steering committee and technical working groups on each lake, who collectively determine what new and existing science projects will address the top research needs.
      All of the planning effort culminates in a “Year of Intensive Monitoring” for one of the Great Lakes each year, when field projects are carried out and data is collected. In the remaining years of the cycle, the monitoring data is analyzed, reported to partners and the public, and used to guide the next cycle of planning and research.