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Coastal wetland support of Great Lakes fisheries: progress from concept to quantification.
Citation:
Trebitz, A. AND J. Hoffman. Coastal wetland support of Great Lakes fisheries: progress from concept to quantification. TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN FISHERIES SOCIETY. American Fisheries Society, Bethesda, MD, 144(2):352-372, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
Fishery support is a widely recognized as a valuable ecological service, yet procedures for measuring this service are still not well developed. Drawing on field data collected as part of past Great Lakes ecological indicator development work by EPA, this manuscript demonstrates that Great Lake coastal wetlands support a variety of species sought by recreational and commercial fisheries, and that quantifying fishery support is complicated by factors including varied human user groups, diverse fish life histories, and complex spatial scales. The composition of fishery-relevant species is strongly related to wetland ecological conditions and thus capable of being affected by management actions of direct interest to EPA (eutrophication control, restoration under GLRI, etc.). This manuscript supports current research efforts under Safe and Healthy Communities aimed at establishing relationships between environmental conditions and ecological services and benefits.
Description:
Fishery support is recognized as a valuable ecosystem service provided by aquatic systems but is harder to quantify than to describe conceptually. In this paper, we intersect data on fish inhabiting Great Lakes coastal wetlands with information on commercial and recreational harvest and the piscivore forage base to develop quantitative understanding of species involved in direct and indirect fishery support of this complex fishery. We then examine patterns of species co-occurrence and life history and relationships to wetland conditions, in order to identify fishery support metrics useful in aggregating species patterns and evaluating management outcomes. Our criteria for wetland prevalence (=10% occurrence) and fishery importance (=0.1% of harvest in one or more Great Lake) yielded 24 wetland-using fishery-relevant species including sport, pan, rough, and forage species from multiple taxonomic groups and life history categories. Wetland-using species are estimated to make up roughly half the biomass and 60% of the dollar value landed commercially in the Great Lakes, and ~80% of the number of fish harvested recreationally. All the studied wetlands supported species of interest to recreational and commercial fishing but with widely varying composition. A few key habitat characteristics (e.g., vegetation structure) are broadly predictive of the types of sport and panfish present. In general, more degraded wetlands support abundant but lower-value fish taxa (e.g., roughfish species) while less degraded wetlands support fewer but higher-value taxa (sport and panfish species). No single taxonomic or functional metric seems adequate to capture the diversity of fishery-relevant species supported; fishery support needs to be understood and managed in a multi-metric context.
