Project
Quantifying Great Lakes fish population and community resilience to ecosystem change
Environmental gradients, ecosystem change, and management actions influence fish community composition, species interactions, and ecosystem stability, modifying fisheries productivity and sustainable yield across scales. Previous research has characterized drivers of fish population and community dynamics at local and regional scales; however, there is a need to assess fish and fisheries responses to ecosystem change and management actions across temporal and spatial scales to inform future predictions. Our team is currently integrating the Phosphorus-to-Fish (P2F) database and updating environmental layers into the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework (GLAHF) across the Great Lakes. Our proposed research will build on this effort to assess relationships between and among environmental conditions, fish populations, and community dynamics and quantify abiotic, biotic, and anthropogenic drivers of Great Lakes fish communities. Quantifying population and community responses to ecological change and management actions can inform management actions to achieve Fish Community Objectives. We will evaluate three hypotheses: (1) Species with shared functional traits respond similarly to ecosystem change; however, species interactions and management actions can drive local deviations from broad scale patterns, (2) Spatial synchrony will be strongest across sites with similar environmental conditions, while fluctuations of species with shared functional traits will be synchronous across long timescales, but random or compensatory at short timescales, and (3) The adaptive capacity of fish communities to reshuffle species dominance and composition drives resilience of fisheries productivity and stability to ecological perturbations and management actions.