Integrated Assessment
Research projects in the integrated assessments theme generate policy-relevant and synthetic efforts to help guide long-term resource use in the basin.
Two large integrated assessment programs have been funded in part through CILER for multiple years. One has been looking at an adaptive integrated framework for managing invasive species, land-use, and climate change stressors in Saginaw Bay. The framework utilizes ecosystem and socio-economic historical and current data input from managers, researchers, and modelers in order to drive the direction of an ensemble of models (watershed, hydrological, and human dimension) to predict resource outcomes (water quality, fish production, and economic metrics). Results indentify knowledge gaps for model refinement, drive further field and experimental research, and bring to light management alternatives. The ultimate goal is to develop models adaptable across U.S. coastal ecosystems with their own unique sets of multiple stressors. The other program looks at the causes, consequences, and solutions to deal with hypoxia in central Lake Erie. The overall objective is to create, test, and apply models to forecast how multiple factors, such as surface water flow, phosphorus input, lake dynamics and ecology, climate variation, fish movement patterns, and fish and Dreissenid biology influence, or are influenced by, hypoxia formation. The main emphasis on model output is fish production potential under the various scenarios.
Finally, university and GLERL researchers are looking at improving GIS ecological classifications and food web modeling of invasive species impacts in the Great Lakes. Specifically, they inventory, map, and classify physical and biological habitats for aquatic ecoregions, analyze hydroacoustics data on fish species composition and biomass, construct food web models for inshore and offshore waters, and simulate invasive species impacts on the lakes. The enhanced databases and models will be pieces in a larger puzzle looking at the spread and bioeconomic impacts of invasive species in order to improve management and policy in the Great Lakes, especially at preventing invasions in the first place, which is likely the most cost-effective.
