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Lake Michigan 2020 Report (Pages 150-167, Lake Michigan CSMI Lower Food Web Survey Data Summary)
Citation:
Keeton, K., T. Hollenhorst, S. Miller, P. McKinney, J. Gerads, A. Opseth, R. Lepak, A. Banerji, AND J. Hoffman. Lake Michigan 2020 Report (Pages 150-167, Lake Michigan CSMI Lower Food Web Survey Data Summary). Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, West Lafayette, IN, 2024.
Impact/Purpose:
The Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI) is a program conducted under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to provide needed scientific data to the Lake Action Management Plans. In 2020-2021, the Lake Michigan CSMI had an extended field year. For this project, researchers from the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Office of Research and Development Great Lakes Toxicology and Ecology Division collaborated with researchers from the US Geological Survey and USEPA Great Lakes National Program Office to sample a set of lake-wide stations at 16 nearshore-offshore transects during July 2021 for water quality, water chemistry, and zooplankton abundance. Our combined results highlight the need to integrate lower food web data with fishery data to evaluate how changing spatial patterns in primary production, long-term change in zooplankton community composition, and invasive species are altering trophic relationships and fish recruitment.
Description:
Pages 150-167 of Lake Michigan 2020 Report Lake Michigan has undergone substantial biological change in the lower food web, as evidenced by lake-wide changes in primary productivity (Stadig et al., 2020), zooplankton abundance and composition (Barbiero et al., 2019), fish recruitment (Eppehimer et al., 2020), and trophic transfer of contaminants (Lepak et al., 2019). Changes in the lower food web have been attributed to invasive species, particularly Dreissenid mussels, as well as to changes in nutrient inputs to the lake (Bunnell et al. 2018). Specifically, diversion of nutrient and energy flow following Dreissenid establishment has resulted in nutrient rich nearshore areas and nutrient poor offshore pelagic areas (Hecky et al., 2004; USEPA, 2019). Thus, these changes have not been uniform throughout the lake or through time, which presents multiple challenges for lake managers to determine a course of action and increases the amount of spatial and temporal information required to support management decisions. This project addresses numerous priorities identified by the Lake Michigan Partnership Management Committee (LMPMC) regarding Nutrient-Food Web Dynamics in a Changing Ecosystem. The priorities identified by the LMPMC specifically address needs to improve our understanding of how nutrient inputs, phytoplankton and zooplankton abundance, as well as invasive species are changing, and how this change influences prey fish and game fish growth and recruitment.
URLs/Downloads:
REPORT.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 10561.566 KB, about PDF)https://iiseagrant.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CSMI-Lake-Michigan-2020_21-Executive-Summary-and-White-Paper-FINAL-1.pdf
