US Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center

Thu, 11/06/2008 - 10:06pm

When: September 19, 2012 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center will discuss their research that takes place on the Great Lakes, including deep-water science, invasive species, coastal ecosystems, restoration ecology, and environmental health. Speakers include: Dr. David Warner (USGS Deepwater Science Program); Dr. Bruce Manny (Restoration of Fish Spawning Habitat in the Huron-Erie Corridor); Joseph Baustian (Reconnecting Coastal Wetlands in the Great Lakes Basin to Improve Ecosystem Functioning); David Galbraith (Forecasting Invasive Phragmites Expansion in the Great Lakes Coastal Zone) Headquartered in Ann Arbor, The Great Lakes Science Center exists to meet the Nation's need for scientific information for restoring, enhancing, managing, and protecting living resources and their habitats in the Great Lakes basin ecosystem. The Center has biological stations and research vessels located throughout the Great Lakes Basin and is the only federal agency that has a large research vessel (70 ft.+) operating on all five Great Lakes!

Transcript

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[00:00:04.47] [MUSIC PLAYING]
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[00:00:32.54] TIM GRIMES: Good evening, everybody and welcome. Welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. My name is Tim Grimes. I'm the manager of community relations and marketing, here, at the library. And thank you so much for coming out, this evening, fro this really, really special event.
[00:00:47.80] It's one of many events that we hold, here, at the library. We hope to see you back for more of them. If you want to see what is being offered, at the library, please go to our website, at aadl.org. Or you can pick up one of these brochures that are right at the back.
[00:01:04.21] We have events about every evening or every afternoon, here, at the library, either at the downtown library or at one of our branches. For example, if you came here, tomorrow evening, at 6:00, on Thursday, we have a wonderful documentary, Urban Roots. It's about the urban farming in the Detroit area. And there'll be a community discussion immediately following.
[00:01:26.72] We have a wonderful person who's going to be telling adults storytelling about the stars, on Friday evening. So every night, there's something happening at the library. So thank you so much for joining us this evening.
[00:01:40.56] Again, this is a very special event. We have some of the top scientists, this evening, from the US Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center. And here to tell us more, the communications officer, Holly Muir.
[00:01:54.48] [APPLAUSE]
[00:01:59.98] HOLLY MUIR: Good evening, everyone. Can hear me, OK, in the back? Thank you all for your interest in USGS science and for this opportunity to tell you a little bit about our research. We're going to have four different talks tonight, with about five minutes of questions in between. And we also have a new video to share with you.
[00:02:18.39] So I'm going to go over some introductory slides. The USGS Great Lakes Science Center is located on U of M's north campus, here in Ann Arbor. And this is a picture of it on a not very busy day. Usually, our parking lot is completely filled with small vessels, cars.
[00:02:38.55] At the headquarters building, we house about 40 to 50 federal employees and also 20 to 30 contractors. We also house the USGS Midwest Area Regional Executive Office, within the building, on our second floor.
[00:02:54.54] The USGS Great Lakes Center's mission is to advance scientific knowledge and provide scientific information to restore, enhance, manage, and protect the living resources and their habitats in the Great Lakes basin ecosystem.
[00:03:11.25] We have field stations and biological staff strategically located throughout the Great Lakes basin. So we're down here, in Ann Arbor, and all of these are field stations or vessel locations. At each one, there is a staff of about 5 to 15 people.
[00:03:28.37] The Great Lakes Science Center is unique in that it's the only federal agency in the US that has a large research vessel operating on each of the Great Lakes. We are especially proud of our two new vessels, that just replaced the aging vessels, on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.
[00:03:45.50] And these are 70 foot, aluminum hull vessels. They are state-of-the-art platforms. We also call them floating laboratories. And they just help us do our science safer and more efficiently. So we're excited to have those.
[00:03:59.89] This is our organizational chart for the Center, including all of the field stations. And, basically, how we organize our people is by basin. So if you're doing work on the western basin lakes, which includes Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and Lake Huron, then you would be in that western basin ecosystems branch.
[00:04:18.97] If you're doing work in an eastern basin lake, either a Lake Erie or Lake Ontario, then you're in the eastern basin ecosystem branch. We also have folks that are doing coastal ecosystem's work. So they work in the near shore and coastal environments.
[00:04:34.16] And three of our scientists, today, are from the coastal science branch. So we'll get to hear about that work. So I've gone over how our organizational structure works and then our geographical deployment. And basically, the bottom line is just that it doesn't matter what branch you're in or where your stationed at, we're all working together, as one center, with one mission.
[00:04:55.10] And all of our science falls under these six, broad research categories. And these are new themes that we've just developed. We're currently putting together a new, five-year, strategic science plan. And within that plan, these six topics will include deep water ecosystems-- there's some pictures here representing that theme-- invasive species research, coastal ecosystems research, restoration, ecology, environmental health, and emerging issues, which we didn't really have pictures for that yet, because we don't know what will happen in the next five years, that we'll have to deal with.
[00:05:30.01] So while all the scientists, that we have here, today, are from our Ann Arbor station, we're doing work on all sorts of topics, from pollinators to beach health restoration, all sorts of things. So we'll hear a sampling, today. But we're doing a lot more.
[00:05:43.93] So with that, I will introduce our first speaker, who is Dr. David Warner. And he is going to talk about that USGS deep water science program. And the Dr. Warner is our research fishery biologist, within the deep water program.
[00:05:57.89] He has earned a bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. Degrees in fisheries, biology, and natural resources, respectively. His current research interests include Great Lakes ecology, ecology of invasive species, and remote sensing in ecology.
[00:06:13.86] [APPLAUSE]
[00:06:23.05] DAVID WARNER: Thank you, Holly. And thank you, everyone, for being here, tonight. I appreciate having this opportunity to tell you a little bit about what we do in the deep water science or deep water ecosystems program at the Great Lakes Science Center.
[00:06:36.49] This is a program that has been in existence, in some way, shape, or form, for quite some time. In essence, you could date it back to the early 20th, late 19th century, with the prevalence of fish hatcheries that were popping up around.
[00:07:01.50] But most of what I'm going to talk to you about, today, is from more modern times, basically going back to, about, the 1970s. I'm going to talk to you about what we do. I'm going to try and provide you with some examples of our research.
[00:07:21.03] And I'm going to try and talk, a little bit, about what it's like being out on the large vessels that Holly mentioned. Because it's an important part of what some of us do at this lab. After I've gone through those three, general topics, I hope to have you guys ask questions.
[00:07:47.78] What we do is really, really, critically dependent upon the large vessels that we have. We're the only agency that has these large vessels on all five of the Great Lakes. It's something that's been a common theme in our deep water research, the use of these vessels, since the 1920s.
[00:08:12.63] In the 1920s, the work started out in what were converted fishing vessels, basically. We've had a number of other vessels that were converted fishing vessels, as well. But on these vessels, we basically developed this theme or this goal of providing data for the management of important fish species in the Great Lakes.
[00:08:41.94] This goes back to when we were actually the Commercial Fisheries Bureau. Ultimately, because of the advancements in science, in general, and because of the increase in the scrutiny of how federal dollars are spent, I'm happy to say that things have evolved from being monitoring based, in which we simply go out and collect data to hand off to managers and add a new data point every year.
[00:09:17.45] We're now into the realm of conducting hypothesis-driven or hypothesis-based research. We've really had to evolve. And if you think about the kind of time we put into this work-- and I'll get to some of this in a little while-- it's really important to recognize that we can actually get to this point.
[00:09:43.90] Because if we were still at this point, I don't think we would have very many scientists who were willing to go out on the boats. Because it doesn't make for a very rewarding scientific career to add another data point, a new year's data point to a graph.
[00:10:02.70] As Holly mentioned, we have pretty wide breadth of coverage throughout the Great Lakes. And we have one of these large vessels on each of the Great Lakes. The ones I'm going to talk to you about, today, the one's I'll show you pictures of, today, are going to be the Grayling and the Sturgeon.
[00:10:25.69] Those two vessels work, primarily, in Lakes Michigan and Huron. The Grayling is just under 80 feet long and was built in 1977. So it's about 35 years old. It was purpose-built, for our lab, to go out and do this fisheries research.
[00:10:49.97] We can sleep in the neighborhood of five to six people on the boat. And we regularly do. The Sturgeon, on the other hand, was not purpose-built for our lab. It was built for the purpose of longline fishing in the Atlantic Ocean.
[00:11:09.83] It's a little bit larger. It's 105 feet long. We can sleep in the neighborhood of 9 to 10 people on the boat, pretty comfortably. And it has a little bit of a checkered past, if you will, which some of my colleagues may not even know about.
[00:11:27.16] The boat originally had a private owner, who used it for a longlining. Apparently, it was difficult to make money as a longliner. And the owner decided to take up a new trade, which was trafficking cocaine.
[00:11:44.24] Unfortunately for him, fortunately for us, and the people in the United States, he got caught. And his vessel was confiscated. It ended up in the hands of the Smithsonian Institution and was a research platform, for them, for a number of years. But eventually, it got to the point where it needed a retrofitting or an overhaul.
[00:12:04.40] And the Smithsonian simply couldn't come up with the funding to do it. At that point, it went on the government surplus list. And our lab ended up with it and, over the course of about 10 years, put a lot of money into it. And we have a phenomenal work platform now.
[00:12:25.18] So on these boats, we use a variety of sampling gears, things called echosounders, which is a form of sonar, trawls, which is basically a big net, gill nets, both of which are focused on catching fish, nets for catching invertebrates.
[00:12:45.77] I'm going to show you some pictures, but we even do water sampling. We're getting down to lower trophic levels, primary producers, phytoplankton. We don't stick to things that have a backbone, anymore, because we know, food web research, top notch research is going to have to be ecosystem based.
[00:13:02.91] And we're even moving into the realm of using data from satellites. We don't own any satellites. But we care for some satellites and run some satellite data programs. And it's proving to be a pretty valuable source of information, in terms of getting a high degree of spatial and temporal coverage.
[00:13:23.50] So just to give you a flavor. This is a slightly closer picture of the Sturgeon. And you can see, in this picture, right here, this is a trawl. It's a mid-water trawl that's being deployed, at night. And that trawl gets coiled up on this thing, right here, which is what we call a net reel.
[00:13:45.47] You can see, over here, this net that's hanging vertically. It's as much smaller net, small mesh. It's net we use for catching invertebrates, a kind of shrimp, basically, that are in the Great Lakes, called mysis or opossum shrimp. That's these guys, right here.
[00:14:02.56] And then some of my favorite gear, because I'm kind of techie in this realm, is hydroacoustic gear or echosounders. And basically, we have these things, down here, which form a sound wave. They send a sound wave into the water.
[00:14:20.34] That sound wave has a known intensity. And we know, at any given point in time, what the intensity was. We measure the intensity of the returning waves, as they come back, after bouncing off of fish, the bottom of the lake, whatever it may be. And the ratio of the source level, the original intensity, and the returning intensity gives us some idea of how much stuff is in the water column.
[00:14:45.74] Here's an echogram. For example, basically, this is a little hard to think about, in some respects, so the key is to not think too hard. But it's a visual representation of what we can detect with sound. And, simply put, up here, near the top, it's the surface of the water.
[00:15:07.14] This red line, down here, is the bottom. And throughout the water column, from the surface to the bottom, you see all kinds of specs and dots and things like this. Some of them are pretty large. Some of them are pretty small.
[00:15:20.56] The upper part of the water column, up here, you see these things. Those are fish. This was collected while the boat was stationary, drifting. We weren't anchored. But we were moving very slowly. And there were fish making these feeding excursions, down to this area, right here, where there's a really thick line of zooplankton.
[00:15:46.09] We would use one of our trawls, our mid-water trawl, that I showed you, to catch these fish. And in fact, we did use the trawl to catch those fish. And we determined what size they were and what species they were.
[00:15:58.27] The invertebrate net, that I showed you a picture of, we'd used to catch this cloud of stuff, in here. This stuff, in here, is an aggregation of that opossum shrimp, that I showed you a picture of. And you can see two distinct breaks in the scattering from that organism.
[00:16:22.73] This period, where they show up very weakly, we had the lights on the back deck on. We turned the lights off, and, all of sudden, they show up much more strongly. Because they are photophobic. They don't like light.
[00:16:39.18] And then, you can see this latter point, here, is where we turn the lights back on. We would use bottom trawls to fish down here. We can't usually detect fish, with acoustics, down there, because they're too close to bottom.
[00:16:51.94] But this kind of gives you an overview of the different kinds of things we can see and where we might sample things out there. You ask, why would we collect these organisms, right there? That's because they make great fish food.
[00:17:05.30] You know how our doctors tell us fish oil, fish oil, fish oil? Well, these guys are a phenomenal source of fish oil. And they're even being harvested, in some places, to make fish oil for human consumption.
[00:17:17.56] So we track how many of these guys there are. We have a pretty good idea how much prey there is for some of the fish that we really care about.
[00:17:29.29] So moving on to our research, basically, we're in a situation where, as I said, we've moved from monitoring to hypothesis-based research. And I'll give you an example, hopefully, that covers the monitoring and the hypothesis-driven research, all in one fell swoop.
[00:17:51.21] But alewife, this fish, right here, have been an important fish in Lakes Michigan and Huron for many years, Lake Ontario as well. They're important, because, in the mid to late '60s, they became very abundant.
[00:18:06.42] And they died in mass quantities and formed windrows all over beaches. And they were a health issue. They stunk. They were bad for tourism.
[00:18:16.16] Well, the State of Michigan, the State of Wisconsin responded to that overabundance of alewife by establishing populations of Pacific salmonines, Chinook salmon, in particular, through stocking.
[00:18:31.56] And ever since then, it's been sort of a cat and mouse game, a predator-prey relationship between alewife and Chinook salmon. Because Chinook salmon eat, almost exclusively, alewife when they're even remotely available.
[00:18:47.29] Historically, we have used bottom trawl surveys to assess these alewives, to figure out how many are out there, so we can offer some information to managers, who decide how many Chinook salmon to stock each year.
[00:19:01.37] It became clear that wasn't completely satisfactory, after a while. And we realized, hey, you need multiple ways of evaluating their abundance. And we incorporated this new gear, this hydroacoustic sampling.
[00:19:14.83] We went from this kind of spatial coverage, these little dots are where we do bottom trawls-- there are 70 per year-- to this kind of coverage. This is multiple years, but it still gives you some idea. We added a lot of spatial coverage, to get a broader picture of what's actually happening in the lake.
[00:19:34.72] So the fish, this alewife, has long been known to have some important relationship with Chinook salmon. But there has never really been any concerted effort to say what the mechanism or what the mechanistic linkage was, to show, specifically, what life-stage the alewives influenced.
[00:19:57.17] So we took some of our monitoring data that we collected. Up here, upper graph, you see this white line is the abundance of alewife, based on the bottom trawl. And this yellow line is the abundance of the alewife, based on the acoustic survey.
[00:20:15.02] And we took the data from this yellow line. And we made some simple evaluations, using basic statistics. And what we found was a pretty strong indication that high abundances of alewife, these guys, at very young sizes, when the alewife first hatch, lead to increased survival of Chinook salmon.
[00:20:41.18] This lower panel, here, shows the abundance of or harvests of Chinook salmon, over time. That's the white line. And it shows the number stocked. So this graph, right here, is key for managers. They know what they've put in the lake.
[00:20:56.01] What they want to know is what we can tell them to help them understand why there's this variation in this white line. There's not that much variation in a five-year periods in how many fish actually go in the lake. They want to know what's influencing the survival of these Chinook salmon after they stock them.
[00:21:16.05] And the key finding, from the work that we've done, looking for some reasonably strong relationship to help explain survival of Chinook, was pretty straightforward. What we found was that the abundance of age 0 alewife-- that's alewife hatched this year, the little ones, the babies-- can have a relatively strong influence on the survival of young Chinook.
[00:21:43.41] So it helps Chinook get through an early life period, so that they can grow to be large enough to actually be caught by anglers. So that was kind of a useful tool for us. And given the time I had, it was really the only example that I thought fit all of these topics that I wanted to cover.
[00:22:08.68] So I'm taking too much time, here, but life on the ship, if we talk about this. This is what I probably should have started with. We can have cruises that last 5 to 30 days. We get to sleep in places like this, two people to a state room, usually. It's tough after 30 days. People's sleep schedules are never the same.
[00:22:31.05] This is what it looks like in the galley, when you have that many people on the boat. That was a good trip. But after that many days, it can get pretty tough. We do have a TV, there. We can watch TV. We can watch movies.
[00:22:46.65] We work any time, though. If we have good weather, we work. We can't just take time off, because it costs too much for everyone to be out there.
[00:22:56.49] And this bad weather is the key. Wind and waves is basically what will keep us from working, because it becomes a safety issue. People can fall. The gear doesn't perform well. When we have good weather, we're working. When we have bad weather, and we have things like this, it's tougher to work. This is snow, on the boat, in April.
[00:23:16.13] When we're not working, we're doing things like watching TV or going for a bike ride or whatever. But, ultimately, we try to combine fun, like we're having here, in this domino game, and science, to make it all bearable for us, so that we have a positive attitude and fulfill our goals of conducting good science for the US.
[00:23:44.71] And that's really all I've got to say. And I don't think I have any time for questions. But if somebody wants to ask me. Am I wrong about that?
[00:23:56.49] HOLLY MUIR: Just a few questions.
[00:23:57.95] DAVID WARNER: So I do have time for questions. Anybody has any questions, feel free. Yes.
[00:24:04.27] TIM GRIMES: I'll be right there. Hang on, just a moment.
[00:24:11.80] AUDIENCE: So the alewife and the Chinook salmon, they're both introduced species?
[00:24:16.44] DAVID WARNER: They are.
[00:24:17.26] AUDIENCE: So that's what caused the really high levels of alewife?
[00:24:21.07] DAVID WARNER: Yes. The alewife were not purposely introduced, though. They made it here unintentionally.
[00:24:34.13] TIM GRIMES: Hang on. How old is your captain, there, on the boat?
[00:24:39.76] DAVID WARNER: Just under five. And he really, really enjoyed being able to sit in the captain's chair.
[00:24:52.09] [APPLAUSE]
[00:24:52.57] DAVID WARNER: We got one more question.
[00:24:55.08] TIM GRIMES: Hang on.
[00:24:58.52] AUDIENCE: I grew up north if Chicago remember, distinctly, the six foot piles of alewives on the beaches. They let inmates out of the Cook County jails to come and harvest them with pitchforks. This was due to the lamprey eel preying on the lake trout. There weren't any salmon planted at the time.
[00:25:22.83] DAVID WARNER: You're right.
[00:25:23.61] AUDIENCE: So how do the lake trout figure into this, now?
[00:25:28.36] DAVID WARNER: The lake trout are a pretty important part of the puzzle. There's no doubt about it. And we do work on lake trout. We evaluate progress toward restoration of lake trout. Restoration of lake trout is a pretty major goal for most management agencies in the Great Lakes.
[00:25:45.40] However, there is a conflict, if you will, between a lake, in which you have large numbers of alewife, or large enough numbers of alewife to support a reasonably good Chinook salmon fishery, and restoration of lake trout.
[00:26:05.07] Because alewife can do a number of things to impede reproduction of lake trout or successful reproduction of lake trout. One is alewife really like to eat larval fish, when they can get them, fish that are up to a centimeter long.
[00:26:23.97] And they just happen to have significant spatial and temporal overlap with larval lake trout, when larval lake trout hatch and come up off the bottom of the lake. The second way they can impact lake trout reproduction is, we believe, through something called thiamine deficiency complex.
[00:26:44.09] Basically, there is some evidence that alewives, and some other fish, non-natives in particular but alewives especially, have high levels of an enzyme called thiaminase. And consumption of food that has thiaminase levels can lead to thiamine deficiency, which can cause increased mortality of juvenile lake trout stages, egg stage and fry stage.
[00:27:13.29] So it's a delicate balance. And what we've seen, looking at two side-by-side lakes, Michigan and Huron, is that I think there's some evidence that it's going to be difficult to restore lake trout without the near demise of alewife.
[00:27:29.07] We really didn't see much in the way of lake trout restoration success in Lake Huron until the alewife crashed there in about 2003.
[00:27:43.92] TIM GRIMES: Hang on, just a moment.
[00:27:52.18] AUDIENCE: Thanks. That sort of begs the question, in my mind. If the lamprey eel were there, we don't want the lamprey eel. Alewives come. Was the ultimate goal to stock the lakes with the salmon, and, therefore, alewives were a good thing? Or why didn't you just decide to get rid of the alewives when they became too prevalent.
[00:28:17.44] DAVID WARNER: That's a difficult question for me to answer, as a non-manager. I will try my best. And I'll say that alewives can be viewed as a good thing, first and foremost, depending on your point of view. If you were someone whose livelihood depends upon Chinook salmon fishing, which happens to be a billion dollar industry, then alewife are a pretty good thing to have in the lakes.
[00:28:47.57] AUDIENCE: I understand that. But it sounded like the alewives were there, and so let's think of something that we can do with alewives. And rather than eradicate them, you brought in a whole new industry of salmon. I'm not saying that's bad.
[00:29:00.43] DAVID WARNER: We is a term you must use carefully, please.
[00:29:05.55] AUDIENCE: Salmon were introduced.
[00:29:07.15] DAVID WARNER: Yes, by the states, specifically Michigan and Wisconsin, were driving this. Why there was not a focus on simply eradicating the alewife? Frankly, I think there has been an effort to try to knock the alewife numbers back to some level, if not to complete zero or absolute zero, to some level that would allow for successful lake trout restoration.
[00:29:41.05] What we didn't know, for many years, was how low alewife had to be before you could actually have successful reproduction by lake trout. And I think we're getting to the point, now, where we know, as I said earlier, that you probably have to really knock the alewife back to near 0, for any hope of success. That' it. Thank you.
[00:30:07.75] [APPLAUSE]
[00:30:12.72] HOLLY MUIR: They'll probably be time for questions at the end, too. We'll keep all the talks on track, so we don't miss one of them. The next speaker is Dr. Bruce Manny. Bruce is a research fishery biologist within our coastal ecosystems branch. He's earned bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees in biology, zoology, and limnology, respectively.
[00:30:34.67] Dr. Manny designs and conducts research and monitoring activities to restore spawning and nursery habitat for valued native species, within the Huron area corridor of the Great Lakes, in collaboration with bi-national fishery managers and authorities.
[00:30:49.93] [APPLAUSE]
[00:30:55.08] BRUCE MANNY: Well, thank very much, for coming over tonight to hear a little bit about our Great Lakes work. I always like to remind people in the audience that, everywhere else in the world, people would give almost anything to have the resource that we have at our fingertips, here, in the form of the Great Lakes. This enormous quantity of high quality water is a tremendous asset for our country.
[00:31:19.23] One of the things that's produced in those waters are sturgeon. This is a picture of a lake sturgeon, here, over some spawning habitat, up at the Blue Water Bridge, there, at the head of the St. Clair River.
[00:31:31.95] I became interested in sturgeon, back in the late 1990s, because they're a threatened species, in Michigan and in Ontario. There aren't very many of them around in the Great Lakes, compared to what they were, historically.
[00:31:45.11] And they're a very interesting fish, of great value, for a variety of uses that human beings enjoy, among which smoking them and eating them, which is pretty popular in some parts of the country.
[00:31:59.74] But they're the biggest and oldest and longest lived species of fish on the planet. They live to be over 100 years old. And they live to be 300 pounds. So they're pretty big and interesting, from that standpoint.
[00:32:19.83] And I'm going to show you a little video about some habitat that we created, somewhat like this habitat. We created it by adding rock to areas in the connecting channels of Great Lakes, where we knew lake sturgeon would be attracted to spawn on that rock. And I won't say anything while you're watching the video.
[00:32:39.64] [VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[00:32:40.13] -[MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:32:52.27] -The St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, and the Detroit River, also known as the Huron area corridor, are the international waters that connects Lake Huron to Lake Erie. Environmental changes in the corridor, over time, have resulted in a loss of habitat for fish and other organisms.
[00:33:12.27] This video is focusing on the successful St. Clair River fish habitat restoration project and the science and collaboration that made it a success.
[00:33:23.66] -We were so surprised that lake sturgeon found the habitat and were spawning on it, even though it wasn't completely constructed. We wanted to make sure that the materials we used were suitable for fish spawning.
[00:33:35.67] We have been perfecting the habitat materials and determined that a certain size and shape of rock was important to maximize the space between the rocks. If there's too much space, the eggs could be washed out by the water. But if the spaces are too small, the eggs would not be adequately protected from fish and other organisms.
[00:33:57.69] The project team developed a plan and methods to build new spawning habitat to increase lake sturgeon, lake whitefish, walleye, and other native fish populations. We learned that water flow, water depth, and water temperature were all important in the placement of a spawning reef.
[00:34:18.98] Another important factor is the available nursery habitat, downstream, that is crucial for the survival of the young fish produced on the spawning reefs. One of the most important components of these habitat restoration projects is the monitoring that we do, before and after, the reef is constructed.
[00:34:37.48] In this way, we know whether any fish were there, using the area before we construct the reef, and we could document the success of our spawning habitat projects. This video shows that there were lake sturgeon eggs among the rocks and adult lake sturgeon in the area before the construction was even complete.
[00:35:00.28] -Human alterations in the system, in the late 19th and early 20th century, resulted in many changes. One of the largest was the result of widening and deepening for commercial navigation. In the Detroit River, alone, a major modification in the lower river resulted in the removal of over 300 million cubic meters of limestone rock and other material from the bottom of the river.
[00:35:24.97] The result was a dramatic reduction of fish populations throughout the entire Huron to Erie corridor. in 2004, a collaborative group of university, government, industry, and non-governmental organizations established the Huron-Erie Corridor Initiative.
[00:35:44.94] The first two projects, one at Belle Isle, on the Detroit River, the other at Fighting Island, also in the Detroit River but in the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, have significantly improved fish habitat. And we've seen fish responding to our latest project, in the St. Clair delta, while it was under construction.
[00:36:03.90] Fish habitat restoration is a key part of US EPA's strategy to restore impaired beneficial uses in the system. These restoration efforts will provide cultural and economic benefits, bolster commercial and sport fishing, and contribute to a higher quality of life for the people living in the corridor.
[00:36:23.83] All of these projects are part of our long term goal to replace some of the habitat that was removed 100 years ago to support commercial navigation. The next steps, for the partnership, are to choose the restoration sites, based on this model, and build on our past successes.
[00:36:41.21] This is science in action. And this is the kind of research project where we're not just performing research to learn about new things, but we're applying the results for the benefit of the larger community. Our approach, in the Huron-Erie Corridor, is a potential model for success for other locations. We're making sure that our work builds on the science that has gone before, so we're learning and adapting as we move forward.
[00:37:07.94] -The Huron-Erie Corridor is the epicenter of fish populations and fish habitat restoration in the central Great Lakes. The fish spawning habitat restoration successes in these connecting channels can have positive impacts on Lakes Erie and Huron as well as the entire Great Lakes basin.
[00:37:28.71] The Huron-Erie Corridor Initiative partners will continue to work together to manage, restore, enhance, and protect the living resources and their habitats in these connecting waterways.
[00:37:40.59] -[MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:38:06.66] [END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[00:38:07.03] BRUCE MANNY: That's just a brief summary of some of our projects. We've been at this since about 2003. And we've constructed three spawning habitats thus far. The first one was, here, at Belle Isle, as mentioned in the video.
[00:38:24.28] The second one was this Fighting Island project, over here, in Canadian waters, just across from Wyandotte, Michigan. And the last one, which was featured in the video, was this middle channel project, here, in the lower St. Clair River, constructed this spring.
[00:38:41.64] And the video, of the sturgeon spawning there and depositing their eggs, was in March, April of this year, just a few months ago. What we're trying to do is create enough habitat, here, to make a measurable difference in the recruitment and survival of the lake sturgeon in this connecting channel, between Lakes Huron and Erie.
[00:39:02.89] Historically, there were thousands and thousands of lake sturgeon in this area. As a matter of fact, in that middle channel spot, right there, there wan an account, in the late 1800s, 1890, of capturing over 4,000 lake sturgeon, during the month of June, for a caviar harvesting operation that was going on there.
[00:39:26.64] So we don't have anything close to that, these days, in terms of lake sturgeon numbers. In fact, the total number of lake sturgeon, in this whole connecting channel, which is over 100 miles long, is approximately 10,000 fish, 10,000 lake sturgeon of all sizes.
[00:39:42.57] So they're not in abundance at all. They're still a threatened species, both in Michigan and Ontario. So just to look a little further at where we're going with this, I just want to show you a mathematical, spatial, geographic model that we've produced, which identifies, for us, using water velocity and water depth, where the likely spots are, within the St. Clair and Detroit rivers, for construction of habitat that would be attractive to these large fish.
[00:40:15.86] They like fast moving water. The places that we choose to build these spawning habitats are deep, over 30 feet deep. And at that depth, there's no light at the bottom. It's pitch black all the time. And that's good, because no plant growth is able to grow on the top of our spawning habitat.
[00:40:36.19] So it remains clean, year round, and it'll be there for 100 years or longer, I would say. Because there's nothing to remove it. So these little, circled areas, here, are spots where the model predicts fast flow, deep water, and likely places to build spawning habitat for lake sturgeon and a variety of other species.
[00:41:00.12] I should mention that, in these three sites that we've built the habitat already, we've had over 14 native species of fish spawning there, including the big three, sturgeon, whitefish-- lake whitefish, like you order at the restaurant on your out for fish dinner-- and walleye, which is another very popular recreational and sport fish.
[00:41:27.06] So just to look a little further, then, try to summarize a little bit for you. We're looking at a connecting channel, about 100 miles long, here, from Lake Huron down to Lake Erie. It's unobstructed. There are no dams. There's nothing to obstruct fish movement.
[00:41:44.94] So we envision this as the epicenter of a production of fish that will increase over the years due to the spawning habitats that we're creating here. And eventually, the fish will radiate out through the central Great Lakes, all the way to Lake Michigan, and all the way out to the other end of Lake Erie.
[00:42:05.99] There's nothing to stop fish from moving, from this central region, that far. And as a result, we've gotten a lot of wonderful support and funding from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative of President Bush, I believe, which President Obama has continued and has expected to continue on from this point.
[00:42:29.11] So we're looking at a long term project, here, of 5 to 10 more years, with a construction of, perhaps, as many as 10 more spawning reefs, for these native fish species, in this connecting channel, with the ultimate goal of remediating an impairment that was established, as one of the 43 reasons why the Great Lakes needed to be cleaned up, in the 1972 Water Quality Agreement, and that is the loss of fish and wildlife habitat.
[00:43:03.13] We expect that are efforts will remediate that beneficial use impairment. And we'll be able to say, hey, we don't have a habitat problem anymore, in the Great Lakes, for these fish.
[00:43:17.48] So with that, I'll take any questions that you may have about this work.
[00:43:24.46] AUDIENCE: I have several questions. One, is this corridor determined to be the best spawning area for these sturgeons? What is the optimal population you're looking for? 10,000 individuals seems awfully large to me. But evidently, that's not large enough. And are these, I think you said, to populate all of the Great Lakes, eventually?
[00:43:48.12] BRUCE MANNY: There's a dam on the St. Mary's River, so these fish can't get up into Lake Superior. And there are also dams down below Lake Erie, so the fish that are produced in this central region won't be able to get down to Lake Ontario. So those are a given.
[00:44:04.45] The dams were put in there to control water levels in the lakes, so we are able to, say, have a high water level or low water level, as we wish. Your first question, again, was what now? Why are we doing this?
[00:44:18.64] AUDIENCE: Was this corridor determined to be the best spawning area of that whole territory?
[00:44:25.06] BRUCE MANNY: Yes. Going back through the scientific literature, this was one of the most abundant areas for lake sturgeon, throughout the Great Lakes. There were tremendous catches of lake sturgeon, here, back in those days, millions of pounds per year.
[00:44:41.82] But at that rate, they were very quickly depleted. And as a result, what we have left, these days, is just a tiny remnant of the original population number.
[00:44:52.55] AUDIENCE: And what is your population goal number?
[00:44:54.81] BRUCE MANNY: Our goal would be millions, millions of lake sturgeon, in the Great Lakes, again, which is the condition that existed back around 1870.
[00:45:07.20] There's a record of high numbers of lake sturgeon in those days. In fact, they were considered a nuisance by the commercial fisherman. And they actually killed them, at random, just to get rid of them, so they could catch whitefish and walleye.
[00:45:26.56] AUDIENCE: Hello. I was wondering, what is the situation with the Asian carp, at this point in time?
[00:45:33.34] BRUCE MANNY: Oh, I'm glad you brought that up. The Asian carp, the next great invader of the Great Lakes. They are going to be a big headache if they do get established in the Great Lakes.
[00:45:46.01] Presently, there's very little evidence that they are actually in the Great Lakes. A little bit of genetic evidence that there's some residue in, even, Lake Erie and in Lake Michigan, from, say, something to do with Asian carp, perhaps mucus off of an Asian carp or some bird ate an Asian carp and then defecated in, say, Lake Erie and passed that DNA evidence on to Lake Erie.
[00:46:13.74] As far as catching any Asian carp in nets or anything like that, they haven't done that, in the Great Lakes, to date. And I hope that I can stand up here, 10 years from now, and say, that that's never going to happen.
[00:46:29.05] But right now, there's a wide open connection, between Lake Michigan and the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, which is a wide open door for the Asian carp to invade the Great Lakes. And there's nothing to stop them, at this point, from invading the Great Lakes. This gentleman, here, has.
[00:46:48.81] AUDIENCE: I think I have a tactical question or two about the habitat restoration. I noticed, on the charts that you had, the reefs built from rounded field stone then angular limestone and then mixed rock and then there's a boulder barrier, downriver from that. What's working best? What's the theory, there?
[00:47:15.39] BRUCE MANNY: Boy, that's a great question. The boulder field, downriver, is a modification of our design that was based on some work in Minnesota, where they had a sturgeon spawning area at the base of a dam.
[00:47:29.37] And they found that fish use that spawning area, more readily, if they had a boulder field downstream a little ways, so the fish could congregate there, get out of the fast current, and build up their reservoir of strength to swim rapidly upstream and spawn right at the base of the dam.
[00:47:47.60] So we took that as an early improvement, so to speak, on our model of how to build these habitats. But since then, with this evidence at the middle channel, where the fish were spawning on that mixed cobble substrate, we didn't have the boulders in place yet. So we since concluded they're not needed. And we're not going to include the boulders in the future.
[00:48:08.72] And as far as that cobble goes, it's made up of both angular and rounded rock, because we found, by experiment, that that was a preferred ratio. Approximately five to eight inch rounded or angular rock is the optimal size that the fish prefer. That's where they end up spawning if they're given a choice.
[00:48:30.06] We tried a whole variety of other sizes of rock and various mixtures. And that, what you saw in there, was what we've settled on, now, as the preferred substrate. That's what the fish seek out. That's where they deposit the eggs.
[00:48:44.49] AUDIENCE: Earlier, there was a slide that showed the structure of the reef, And a foot at one end and a foot and a half at the other end, downriver. It's higher downriver.
[00:48:55.47] BRUCE MANNY: Yeah, it's wedge-shaped. The reason for that is to increase tractive forces of the water across the face of the reef. As it hits the reef and is deflected upward, it increases in velocity, and keeps fines from filling up the spaces in the reef. It's a self-cleaning concept. Thank you.
[00:49:18.18] [APPLAUSE]
[00:49:26.91] HOLLY MUIR: Our next speaker is Joe Baustian. He is going to talk about reconnecting coastal wetlands in the Great Lakes basin, to improve ecosystem functioning. Joe is a research analyst, also within the coastal ecosystems branch.
[00:49:40.31] Before arriving in Michigan, Joe work as a research associate in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences at Louisiana State University. Currently, his research focuses on restoring coastal marshes in the Great Lakes Basin.
[00:49:56.09] [APPLAUSE]
[00:50:00.77] JOE BAUSTIAN: Thank you, Holly, and thank you, everyone, for coming out today. As you heard, I'm going to be talking about something a little bit different than our first two speakers. And I'm really going to be talking about restoring coastal wetlands, specifically, with one technique, where we're going to restore the hydrology of these wetlands. And it'll become clear, in a minute, why these wetlands need their hydrology restored.
[00:50:21.72] But before I get into that, I'd like to just think Dr. Kurt Kowalski, who is a coauthor on this project, and the other co-investigators, Mike Wiley, from the University of Michigan, and Doug Wilcox, from State University of New York, at Brockport.
[00:50:35.89] And I also have to mention the people who do the majority of the actual boots-on-the-ground work for this project, Mike Eggelston, Sean Green, and Alex Czayka. And they've been quite a few other people over the last few years this project's been going on. But these are people, that for the last year, have really made the most impact on this project.
[00:50:55.18] And as Holly said, I came from Louisiana. So when I think of something being coastal, I'm not thinking of a lake in the middle of the country. I'm thinking of the oceans on the edges of the country. And I think most people probably have that same type of feeling when you hear the word, coastal.
[00:51:09.19] But the Great Lakes are such a large system, that they are considered coastal for many ecological purposes. So coastal wetlands in the Great Lakes can simply be defined as wetlands that have a direct hydrologic connection with the Great Lakes.
[00:51:23.75] And these are dynamic systems who have constant fluctuations in water level. And then we seasonal fluctuations in vegetation and animal usage. So one of the important factors, in many of the coastal wetlands, is this fluctuation in water level.
[00:51:41.64] We kind of alluded to, in the previous talk, that there is some dams, in key spots, on the Great Lakes that can control water levels between some of the lakes. And really, this doesn't do a great job in the middle. But it controls the water levels in Lake Superior and in Lake Ontario, mostly.
[00:51:56.56] But in the middle, Michigan, Huron, and Erie, we have a more free, water system, which the water levels can be controlled by precipitation and evaporation throughout the year. But then we also have a situation in all the lakes but, really, in Lake Erie, most significantly-- it's a term called a seiche. You can think of it like a tide in the ocean, where the water level can go up and down, every day.
[00:52:20.40] But this is really caused by meteorologic functions. And so think about the wind blowing on the water of the lake and moving it in one direction. Well, then It's going to hit the edge. And then it's got to come back in the other direction.
[00:52:30.66] So there's this constant sloshing around of water. And this really drives water level fluctuations, within these systems, which is important for many fish, birds, and plant species that use or inhabit the Great Lakes coastal wetlands.
[00:52:43.73] So in extent, the Great Lakes coastal wetlands cover approximately 480,000 acres. And that might sound like a big number, this is only a third of what we had 150 years ago. So we had quite a few losses of these wetlands.
[00:53:00.80] And what does exist today, currently, is usually behind a dike or a levee of some type. So really, you have these wetlands that are next to the Great Lakes, but they're not really functioning like coastal wetlands any more, because they don't get that fluctuation of water.
[00:53:16.81] And they also aren't able to filter that water. It's one of the great things about wetlands, anywhere, is that they're able to filter our water and make it a little bit cleaner. They can remove nutrients. They can remove sediments.
[00:53:27.86] And that just improves the health of lakes or streams, whatever the surface water in the area is. These dikes also provide a problem, because fish that would normally accesses these wetlands to spawn or feed or seek just shelter from other predators, well, they can't get to these wetlands anymore. So they're really restricted on what they can do.
[00:53:48.90] To give you an example of the locations of where I'm talking about, we have this map that shows elevation along the Great Lakes. And so the dark-red areas are high elevation land. And as it gets lighter, in orange and yellow and whitish, you start to get lower elevation.
[00:54:02.61] And then the blue is, obviously, the lakes. And the darker blue is deeper water. And then when you start to get on these peripheries, where it gets lighter and whiter, it's actually kind of a land water interface, you might say, where we have a lot of coastal wetlands, traditionally, being found.
[00:54:16.86] So I've circled three areas, here, where a lot of coastal wetlands used to be found, Green Bay, Saginaw Bay, and the whole western part of Lake Erie. And as we just saw in the last talk, the connecting zone, the Huron-Erie corridor, between Lake Huron and Lake Erie.
[00:54:32.11] And I'm going to talk, specifically, about one project, today, right here, at this red star, at the Ottowa National Wildlife Refuge. So the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge sits in northwest Ohio. And It consists of a lot of different types of wetlands, some forested habitat as well.
[00:54:49.69] And you can see, one defining feature is it's got Crane Creek, which is just a small tributary to Lake Erie, that runs right through it. And so out here, beneath these lines, is where the creek goes out into the lake.
[00:55:02.15] So what you can imagine is when the lake levels increase, lake water actually comes back into the creek and would flood all of these wetlands, here. And then when the lake level decreases, the water can go back out.
[00:55:14.47] Well, that was what the traditional situation may have been. But today-- I don't know if can see these white lines we kind of outlined, and some of them that are just grayish-white lines, throughout here. These are all levees that were put up, or dikes, around these wetlands so managers at the refuge could control water levels. And they can control what plants grow there, what birds might want to use the property at the refuge.
[00:55:35.97] So with these levees, you don't get the natural fluctuation of water anymore. , Instead you have to use diesel powered pumps to pump water in and out, as you want. And it takes a long time. And it's expensive. And it's not really manageable, on a large basis, into the future, with decreasing budgets for the wildlife refuge system.
[00:55:54.49] So one other thing I'd like to point out here is, the yellow line is the boundary of the refuge. But if you notice, all along the outside, here, there's other land, which is farmland. And then, at one point, the whole refuge was also part of a farm.
[00:56:07.58] But over the last seven years, different parts have had levee failures. So the levees that kept the lake waters out, so it could be farmed, have broken. And so it was just decided to put the levees back and keep these as flooded habitats, as part of the refuge system.
[00:56:20.58] So if somebody was so in inclined to do, all these other farms around the area, that used to be coastal marshes, they used to be coastal marshes around the Great Lakes, could be turned back into coastal wetlands again if there was some type of incentive to do so.
[00:56:37.74] But there's not really much of an incentive to do it further than what we have, right now. And so we're focusing on reconnecting the habitats that we have. And so we have this experiment, here, where we have two different pools, that were completely diked off wetlands, Pool 2A and Pool 2B.
[00:56:54.16] So what we did was we connected Pool 2B to Crane Creek, here, which effectively is connected to Lake Erie, so water can freely flow throughout the system and fish can use it and all the other wildlife that would use this area.
[00:57:08.25] To give you a better example of what actually happened, here, this little diagram shows an example of what a diked wetland looks like, like out Pool 2B wetland before we constructed the reconnection. So we have Crane Creek, over here, which was connected to the lake.
[00:57:21.80] And so the water level goes up and down as the lake levels go up and down. You have kind of high turbidity, high nutrient water, because this whole creek drains a farmed landscape. So what you have is a lot of sediment in the water, and you have a lot of nutrients in the water, from fertilizer runoff, from the farm fields.
[00:57:39.50] And this can cause problems with algae blooms in the creek, itself, and when the water gets into Lake Erie, you can have algae blooms in the lake, which has been a problem over the last 30 years. And last year, there was an especially large problem with algae blooms in Lake Erie.
[00:57:54.66] So in the creek, you also have a lot of fish, a lot of different kinds of fish, fish that come from the lake, fish that come from upstream. And they all kind of congregate in this coastal area.
[00:58:04.21] Now, we have the coastal wetland before it was reconnected, where you don't have any water level fluctuation, except for if a pump is put in place or whatever evaporation and rainfall takes place. And you have fish in it, but not very numerous. They're low abundance and not a very diverse population as well.
[00:58:22.09] So what we did was put a big tube, basically, through the levee. We didn't want to take the levee down completely, because nothing like this has really been done and studied that well, in the Great Lakes. So just in case something went wrong-- and something could have gone wrong-- we wanted to still have the capability to be able to shut this off and figure out what was happening before it's reconnected back to the lake.
[00:58:48.08] So we basically dug a big channel, put a couple pipes through there. And since it's been completed, in April, 2011, it's been opened 100% of the time. So, so far, we haven't had anything pop up that's been cause for alarm or cause for closure of the structure.
[00:59:04.89] So if we revisit that previous diagram, you can see now, we have this connection, through the levee, that connects Crane Creek and Pool 2B. And so you have fish and other invertebrates moving through here. And then, importantly, we have this nutrient rich, high turbidity water that can go in.
[00:59:22.16] And in theory, what would happen is, this dirty water goes into the wetland. And again, like I said, the wetland can act like a filter. And then clean water would come back out, as the lake levels switch, and the water starts to move back in the other direction.
[00:59:34.23] So that's what we think should have happened when we did this. And this is actually a better view of the structure, here. These red, little circles, here, are actually the covers that could be lowered down, over the openings, and those are four foot in diameter. So they're pretty hefty openings, through the levee.
[00:59:53.30] So our question was, can this connected wetland function in the same way as a traditional coastal wetland? And that's what we set out to try and answer with this project. And to do that, we looked at a whole suite of environmental variables.
[01:00:06.52] We looked at the water quality. We looked at the fish populations, the bird populations. We looked at habitat, as far as vegetation goes. We looked at zooplankton and benthic organisms, small invertebrates in the med.
[01:00:18.87] We also looked at the native clam species, because this is one of the few areas, actually, on the coast of Lake Erie, where there is a traditional, native clam species that exists and haven't been completely overrun by invasive zebra mussels and some other invasive species as well.
[01:00:34.61] And so today, I'm just going to focus on some of the initial results, based on our water quality and fish data. I'm going to start with the water quality. And I hope what you can see, here, is two distinct bodies of water.
[01:00:47.82] We have a brown water, over here, and a more clear water, over here. Now, I could show you a graph to show you what's going on here. And I actually will, later. But this is the most convincing evidence you can show somebody of what is happening in this wetland.
[01:01:01.09] So we're standing on top of the structure, looking out into Crane Creek. And so the dirty water, over here, on the left, is the Crane Creek water coming down. It's nice and turbid and high in nutrients, as I mentioned earlier.
[01:01:12.40] And then this clear water is the water flowing out of the wetland. So if you can imagine this in reverse, when the water was flowing into the wetland, a few hours earlier, it looked brown and nasty like this. And after it was in the wetland, for a matter of minutes or hours, depending on however long this period gone by, it comes out looking clean.
[01:01:30.58] So just visually, you can see the improvement in the water quality, right off the bat. So then, of course, you want to try and quantify that improvement in water quality. So what we do is we would go out and try and capture samples and measure nutrients and sediments, in the water, as it's coming into the wetland, and then do the same thing as it's going out.
[01:01:49.33] So this graph, here, at the bottom, just shows, over a week period, in April, after the structure is opened, how the water levels fluctuated in the wetland. And so, at a maximum, we had about two a half feet of water level change, over this week period of time.
[01:02:04.92] And so every time you see this line going up, that means water's going in to the wetland, and every time it's going down, water is going out. And so we took a sample, like I said, when it's going in and when it's coming out and then trying to investigate the difference, between those two samples, to see what was kept in the marsh.
[01:02:21.73] And one of the things that we look at heavily is phosphorus, because phosphorus pollution, from agriculture and industry and sewage treatment plants, is the driver of a lot of the phytoplankton and algae blooms that we see in the lakes. And it's generally seen as a pollutant in the Great Lakes system and in many freshwater systems throughout the world.
[01:02:39.97] So we found that we had a retention of about 17 kilograms over that one inflow and outflow period. So 17 kilograms is about 34 pounds. And so this was over a matter of hours, maybe 12 hours, we were able to capture about 40 pounds of phosphorus, in this tiny little wetland, which is it's about 80 acres. But compared to that 480,000 that exists, coast wide, it's a small piece of the puzzle.
[01:03:07.71] But what we're seeing is, initially, some really great results. And it's able to capture some of the phosphorus in the water. And it's very promising, as far as water quality improvements go.
[01:03:18.17] So I'm going to move on next to talk a little bit about the fish populations. And one thing we try and monitor is the fish composition, what species are there and how many species are there and then, also, the flux into and out of the wetland.
[01:03:29.45] So we look at the composition and abundance by setting nets out in water. We got every two weeks and stay there for two days and set the nets and check them every 24 hours.
[01:03:38.86] And we set nets in Crane Creek, itself, in the reconnected wetland, and then also in that wetland that wasn't reconnected. So we can kind of keep track of what was there beforehand, or in a wetland where it's not reconnected and what's in the reconnected wetland. And this the source, what's in that water that's going to be coming into the wetland. So we can compare the populations in those three areas.
[01:04:01.77] And so as far as the number of species we find, we found that, after we reconnected the pool, there were 16 additional species found in the wetland habitat that weren't there the year before, when the structure was not open, when the wetland was just a pool, by itself, and not connected to the lake system.
[01:04:20.61] So that was great. But on top of that, we found a whole variety of different kinds of fish. We found prey fish, small, little things, like these shiners, up here, that are bait for many other predator species. We found predators, like this gar, northern pike, largemouth bass, that were coming in.
[01:04:37.29] And then really importantly, what we found is a lot of evidence of spawning. We found a lot of northern pike were coming in. And then we found them with eggs. And then a few months later, we find little guys, like this.
[01:04:49.89] So it's pretty good evidence of what's going on here is that the fish are coming in and spawning. And then the little, baby fish, the year 0 or year 1 fish, are sticking around, in this wetland, to feed and just kind seek protection, before going out into the lake and seeking bigger and better things.
[01:05:07.90] The same thing is true with abundance. CPUE stands for Catch Per Unit Effort. And that's just basically a way that, every time we set a net, this is about how many fish we catch. So in 2010, which was before the structure was put in, we saw that, in Crane Creek, there was a lot of fish, because it was connected to the lake.
[01:05:25.60] But then in Pool 2A and Pool 2B, before it was reconnected, they were hardly any fish we were catching. We would catch a couple hundred, but compared to the 1,500 we would catch in the creek, there was very little numbers of fish there.
[01:05:38.36] But then immediately after we reconnected Pool 2B, we saw a large increase in fish. And on a total numbers basis, it was roughly an increase of 70,000 fish, in the first year, compared to the year before. So it's a substantial number of fish that are using this habitat that weren't before, which is great.
[01:05:56.23] Because like I said, before, they're spawning. And they're living there as juveniles. So it could mean good things for the future of the local fish populations in the Great Lakes.
[01:06:06.54] And then final thing I wanted to mention about the fish is that we have a little-- I call it an underwater camera, but it's more of an acoustic thing, like we heard earlier, in the first talk. And so it's a sound camera. It uses sonar. Because if you imagine that dirty water, we were looking at earlier, you can't see it with a regular kind of camera.
[01:06:23.88] So we use sonar. And we have this sonar camera that points right at the structure. And so we can see the fish swimming around and moving in and out. And then we have a computer program that can look at these videos that we collect and basically count the fish for us and tell us which direction they're moving.
[01:06:40.84] And it's really complicated. But we have somebody, Sean Green, who I mentioned earlier, who's taken this on. And it's a really good tool to visually show what's happening at these sites in the murky waters.
[01:06:53.31] And so if you want just a little look, it's on a loop here, every five seconds or so. You see a little fish swimming around and then medium sized fish. And then there's a few bigger fish that come in and out.
[01:07:02.62] But one of the things that this helps us do is we can correlate these videos to figure out, well, are the fish coming in when the water is coming in, as well? Or are they fighting the current and coming in when the water's going out? Or do they only move at night or only during the day or is there certain temperature cues that cause them to come into the wetland?
[01:07:18.71] And so it better helps us to understand when the fish are utilizing this habitat, which can help us with management opportunities in the future.
[01:07:29.47] So just to summarize what we've talked about so far, based on the early results-- and like I said, this only came into came into play in April, of 2011. So it's been a year and a half since this has been open. We've seen great water quality improvements. And we've seen an explosion in fish usage of the wetland.
[01:07:49.49] And from these early results, we can see this is going to have a regional impact. Because if you think back to one of the first slides that I showed all the areas where coastal wetlands are in the Great Lakes, this same type of project could be in play at those sites as well. Because they're full of diked wetlands.
[01:08:03.79] So our early results from the study have actually been very positive. And we've seen a lot of interest from other groups including Nature Conservancy, Ohio DNR, Michigan DNR, Ducks Unlimited, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
[01:08:18.98] So all of these other partners are like, hey, this looks really good. I'm glad that you guys were able to do this. Let's do it here. Let's do it here. Let's do it here, here, here, here. So far, there's been about 12 other projects that have been constructed based on the early results of our one, restoration project.
[01:08:33.64] And the people at Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, where our initial construction took place, are very keen to this type of management for a number of reasons. One, because it improves the habitat, but also because they know they have these aging levees.
[01:08:47.56] So levees only have a lifespan. They have upkeep that needs to happen on these levees. And there's just not always budgets to do the upkeep that's necessary.
[01:08:56.03] So if we can find a way to reconnect these pools and take a little bit of stress off the levees and still allow great habitat for fish and birds in this area, it's kind of a win-win from a management perspective. Because it takes less money, and it's more sustainable into the future.
[01:09:10.54] And so we have to really thank some of the people at Fish and Wildlife Service for pushing this idea forward and trying to improve the habitat for fish around the Great Lakes. With that, I'll take any questions.
[01:09:22.62] [APPLAUSE]
[01:09:27.93] JOE BAUSTIAN: A couple questions.
[01:09:29.17] TIM GRIMES: I'm going come right up here to this gentleman and then the lady, right here.
[01:09:35.31] AUDIENCE: Well, it seems that wetlands around the Great Lakes are becoming more and more dependent on human management. And I wondered whether, first of all, what the long term prospect is for that and to what extent that is a result of either the changes in levels of the lakes or, over a long time, decline in the levels from the lack of ice in the winter and maybe from the prospect of exporting water from the basin.
[01:10:14.22] JOE BAUSTIAN: Well, one of the things that I didn't get into detail about historic land area of coastal wetlands, but you're right. The water levels in the lake have fluctuated greatly, even before we did anything with dams or with rivers or anything going into the lakes. Lake levels always fluctuated, depending on natural conditions.
[01:10:34.69] And so with that, a lot of these coastal systems would retreat. So let's say the lake levels fall, you would get an encroachment of upland trees and grasses moving towards the lake, as the lake levels decreased. And then you have a couple years of low waterfall followed by high water.
[01:10:49.09] And then the wetland plants get to come back, and you increase the wetland habitat. So there's always been this fluctuation. And over the past 50, 60 years, you're right, there's been a real turn towards managing the water flows in the late Great Lakes, in general. And especially in wetland management, that's been the traditional method for managing wetlands is putting levees up, so we can control when water's going to be there and when it's not.
[01:11:11.91] And projects like this are starting to change that mindset with managers of wetlands. And so you're almost more likely, now, I think, to see levees being deconstructed, in a way, and allowing more natural water flows, than levees being reconstructed and built-out to encompass new areas.
[01:11:32.88] So I think there is actually hope. And as far as the future goes, we'll have to see how the water levels in lake actually play out. It could surprise us. There's going to be high years and low years no matter what the long term trend is. So we will have this natural fluctuation into the future.
[01:11:53.43] AUDIENCE: I have two quick questions, if that's OK. First off, I'm from near Saginaw, which is, historically, very swampy. So I'm curious to know if you can comment on what sort of restoration projects might be turning up there.
[01:12:06.18] And second, if you can comment on any kind of microbial ecology that might be associated with wetland reintroduction to the Great Lakes.
[01:12:14.91] JOE BAUSTIAN: So there have been a lot of coastal wetlands around Saginaw Bay, up in that area, as well. And there are some parks and refuges up in there that are also trying to reclaim some farmland and not close in levees. And I'm thinking specifically of Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge.
[01:12:33.12] So they've got some projects going there, where they're going to be reintroducing the Shiawassee River water to be able to flood into some of these adjacent, former farm fields. And that ties into the microbial question, because a lot of farm fields have a legacy impact of fertilizer.
[01:12:50.11] So we have excess fertilizer in the soil. And so once you start reconnecting these, it's possible that there could be an initial slug of fertilizer export from these systems, and nutrient export from these systems.
[01:13:00.62] But depending on how the water levels go, there's some evidence that shows, as long as it's just kept wet but not super flooded, the phosphorus particulate can stay in the soil and not be exported right away. So one more question?
[01:13:16.41] AUDIENCE: Could you elaborate on what are benthos?
[01:13:21.11] JOE BAUSTIAN: The benthos are small organisms. It's just a general term for things that live right on the sediment surface. So it could be larvae of different insects. When the insect's eggs hatch, little different stages, that don't quite look like the full-grown mayfly or full-grown dragonfly or something, they can live along the bottom.
[01:13:40.82] Because the waters in these wetlands are generally, really shallow, a foot to three feet deep, at the most. So it's just a general term for any small organism. A lot of times, they're young of a different type of organism. But they can be worms, too, that live in the mud, little clams, anything really that lives right on the surface.
[01:14:03.28] AUDIENCE: But the picture that was shown showed something red. It didn't look like something I was familiar with being in the Great Lakes.
[01:14:13.17] AUDIENCE: It looked like a scorpion.
[01:14:16.90] JOE BAUSTIAN: It's a larval stage of some type of fly, I believe. I'm not positive. That's not my great expertise. But there are some crazy looking larva of different organisms. In early stages, they don't look anything like they do as adults. It could be some type of fly or other insect.
[01:14:45.08] [APPLAUSE]
[01:14:50.91] HOLLY MUIR: The final speaker is David Galbraith. And he's going to talk about forecasting invasive phragmites expansion in the Great Lakes coastal zone. And Dave is a geographic information systems specialist, within the coastal ecosystems branch.
[01:15:05.28] Dave studied fluvial geomorphology and watershed science at Utah State University. And his current work investigates the landscape ecology of invasive wetland flora and uses these relationships to aid restoration and invasive species control programs.
[01:15:22.95] [APPLAUSE]
[01:15:28.16] DAVID GALBRAITH: Thanks Holly. And thank, all you folks, for coming out and sticking around this late into the evening, here. As the slide here, says, we're talking about a specific invasive species but a plant species. So a little bit different from what some of the other folks have introduced you guys to, here, this evening.
[01:15:48.42] Phragmites is an extremely aggressive, invasive, wetland plant species. There is a native strain of it. But in of this past, recent decade, it's become a more and more pressing issue to the wetland functions, throughout the the Great Lakes basin, here, where It's becoming really well established.
[01:16:12.01] It can get up five meters in height. It forms really dense, monotypic, or just single species, stands that outcompete other wetland plant species and pose little to no beneficial habitats for fish and wildlife, within these wetlands.
[01:16:33.16] There's a broad consensus as far as trying to come up with control strategies for it and throughout the basin as well. And it's becoming more and more key that getting after early detection is going to be critical for keeping it out of an uninvaded areas.
[01:16:55.12] And in order to come up with that, what our research program focused on, initially, was establishing a map of its current distribution throughout the Great Lakes basin.
[01:17:10.39] Well, after we have that map generated, we wanted to develop a decision support tool in order to aid the prioritization of control efforts for phragmites across the US side of the Great Lakes basin. And so in order to do that, we wanted to assess what environmental conditions it most closely correlates with, based on its current distribution patterns.
[01:17:36.66] And then that was going to be one part of a two-pronged approach to assess the vulnerability to future invasions. And the second part of that is simply taking a proximity analysis of existing wetland and stream corridors throughout the Great Lakes coastal zone as well as coastal areas that become exposed during periods of reduced lake levels, that are kind of predicted to become more and more common, here, in the upcoming years, decades and century.
[01:18:10.18] So the study area for this project consisted of the a 10 kilometer inland buffer of the coastal zone. And it also included islands, wherever we had imagery data available and also other environmental data, that I'll get to, here, in a little bit.
[01:18:32.13] So our research partners at MTR-- this was a collaborative research effort that relied on lots of other data sources. And also, the efforts to construct this initial map were conducted in large part by the folks at Michigan Tech Research Institute, which is also based, here, in Ann Arbor.
[01:18:53.42] They used this satellite-based radar data, that covers multiple seasons, across the Great Lakes basin, and uses two polarities in order to come up with a, basically, spectral image of the landscape throughout the coastal zone, here.
[01:19:12.31] And they classified these series of tiles of images based on an enormous amount of field work that was conducted by their technicians across the 2010 and 2011 field seasons. I'd also like to add here, the imagery that they used, in the classification procedure, came from, I believe, 2008 up through 2010.
[01:19:37.73] So it's all really, recent stuff, here, and with a fast invading, wetland plant species like this, it was critical that we did get recent data in order to get after what's going on in the landscape, exactly.
[01:19:52.59] And so they established over 1,100 testing and validation control points. The testing points were used to inform the classification procedures for the mapping effort. And then the validation points allowed them to conduct an accuracy assessment.
[01:20:10.68] So the wound up with 87% overall accuracy, across the basin, throughout each of the lakes. And I'm sorry it's showing up so dark, here.
[01:20:20.31] But where you can probably picture that Lake Superior does, in fact, exist, we didn't find any, for the purposes of this mapping project. You need to remember, that doesn't mean that none exists up there. It just was not detected by this mapping project.
[01:20:39.30] So our mapping project only detected 1/2 acre or 0.2 hectare stands. And they had to be stands that were really dominated by phragmites. So where it's just showing up in a wetland, and there's a plant here, a plant there, the remote sensing methods wouldn't capture that.
[01:20:58.72] We didn't target the native species at all. So these were really just the big stands, where it's really problematic already. But again, establishing where it was, there, lets us get after what areas are most vulnerable to it and shows where it's going to be moving to next, just based on location.
[01:21:23.06] So the really hot zones, the hotspots for it are along the Huron-Erie corridor, here, close to home, and also up in the Saginaw Bay, the Green Bay, and southern Lake Michigan, and then, really, Lake Erie as well, the southern and western portions of Lake Erie, there.
[01:21:42.13] So after we had the map developed, we used existing, past research on phragmites in order to develop this conceptual model of what drives phragmites occurrence and success in the wetland landscapes.
[01:21:56.20] And so on the left of the chart, here, or the diagram, we can see those three variables are, basically, the naturally occurring things and then the human-caused things over on the right side. And so this conceptual model of phragmites, we used to then begin looking at what existing data sets there are out there that can actually describe the processes on the ground.
[01:22:22.95] So the data that are out there, we organized in a geographic information system. And they come from multiple different sources and spatial scales. And the caveat there was we could only use variables for the species distribution modeling that are available across the entire basin.
[01:22:50.45] So lots of data sets might be available for one state or one area and not another. And that limited the specific data sets that we could assess for this exercise. And so some of the things indicate what is happening that would be controlling phragmites, at a specific point, on the ground, whereas others, we would summarize by watershed or based on their proximity to a specific point in the landscape.
[01:23:21.31] And which method was used there, in terms of processing, depended on the nature of the data source but also the nature of the hypothesized relationship between that specific landscape phenomenon, or variable, and phragmites.
[01:23:41.70] So we wound up with a set of 87 candidate environmental variables that we narrowed down based on simple linear correlations between the individual variables and phragmites presence or absence. And of course, I need to remind you guys that that presence or absence was set by the map itself.
[01:24:02.61] So we sampled across the landscape and across that map rather than using the individual points established by the field work that went on in creating the map.
[01:24:18.15] We then got to the statistical world, where we are using these species distribution models to estimate habitat suitability, based on the environmental conditions, and managed to narrow it down to a list of 15 variables-- that was a bit more manageable-- in order to run our final models.
[01:24:40.87] We settled on a method called boosted regression trees. And it combines aspects of machine learning and some general correlative techniques. And that produced a spatially continuous estimate of habitat suitability across the basin.
[01:25:06.17] Now, I want to jump in here and mention that we looked at habitat suitability across the entire basin. But we also separated the lower basin, including Lake St. Clair, from the upper basin, in order to assess if there were different relationships at work that were better for explaining phragmites distribution at those two different scales.
[01:25:29.36] And we found that there were some things that came out. But again, I'll get back to that, here, in a couple of slides. Also, these phragmites prevalence numbers, that's across the entire basin, so within and without the wetland environments. So the numbers look really small. But trust me. It's quite a problem, where it is prevalent, within the wetland areas.
[01:26:05.86] The environmental influences that seemed to explain existing phragmites distribution, were, far and away, just basic topography. Phragmites was found-- well, topographic simplicity. So flatter areas coincided more often with phragmites' presence and also proximity to both current development and also increases in development over the past decade, when we looked at trends in past land development and land cover change.
[01:26:43.49] And also proximity to agriculture was positively associated with phragmites. Soil, the hydrology group, basically, phragmites seemed to be more common in areas that had poorly drained soils. And then also in areas with moderate to high road density.
[01:27:04.81] So then, in order to integrate the findings of the habitat suitability model and come up with, basically, an intuitive and useful tool, across multiple spatial scales, for the management community, we combined things up to where just the map, in and of itself, can show you quite a bit, in terms of what areas are going to be most at risk, especially if you're concerned about a specific refuge or areas of critical habitat for key species.
[01:27:39.59] And then, when you combine that with the underlying habitat suitability, you can see that most of the most suitable areas are already covered up by yellow, there. That'd be the hotter pink end of the color scale, there.
[01:27:57.60] And then also, we looked at those-- like I said earlier-- the reduced lake level corridors offshore. And you can see that phragmites has already extended, based on this previous decade, where we had some reduced lake levels, about a kilometer out into the open water from where the shoreline existed in previous times.
[01:28:23.91] So it's sort of ecological engineer that's really extending that shoreline out and trapping sediment and things along there and sort of adjusting the landscape, for itself, over time.
[01:28:45.10] We basically wanted to show these reduced lake level corridors in order to indicate what might become really vulnerable in the future as fluctuations continue.
[01:28:58.88] And so coming soon, we're going to have all this stuff downloadable and available in a publicly accessible decision support tool. And that is the mapping component of it.
[01:29:12.85] But along with the geospatial products, here, are also just project background and information that the public can use as far as step-by-step instructions on how to use the tool and everything else there.
[01:29:31.67] And again, wrapping up what the environmental controls appear to be, these days, it's topography and proximity to development and agriculture, road density. And then I promised that I would get back to what the differences were between the upper and lower basin.
[01:29:55.22] And the two things that jumped out were nitrogen concentration within watersheds seemed to be more of a control in the upper basin. And the take on that is, basically, that there's not as much variability in the lower basin, in terms of nitrogen concentrations, with respect to differences in phragmites abundance.
[01:30:22.46] So basically, it's just not acting as a control. That's not to say it's not important to the biology. But it's just not a controlling or limiting environmental factor, within lower basin, like it is in the upper basin.
[01:30:36.04] And in the lower basin, the thing that jumped out was not just proximity to development, in and of itself, but proximity to areas that increased in development intensity over the last decade.
[01:30:54.15] So that was interesting there. And then, again, a final conclusion that is coming out of this research is that decision support tool, that I got on the last slide there, and also a Great Lakes collaborative.
[01:31:10.18] That's tying together a lot of the management for phragmites, which happens at the local and county levels. So there's a big effort underway to integrate, from that local, on the grounds, grassroots level, to the statewide and basin-wide and, hopefully, at some point, across the border. Because these are very connected systems with Canada.
[01:31:34.32] And that's one of the things I think I failed to mention here is that our study, of course, only took place on the US side of things. And hopefully, in the future, we can tie that together with the folks that work on this stuff on the other side of the border, there.
[01:31:55.99] Again, a lot of people are extremely generous with their time and data and made this work possible. And so I want to acknowledge those folks and ask if there are any questions.
[01:32:06.41] [APPLAUSE]
[01:32:13.65] AUDIENCE: On one of your slides, you had a boosted regression for tree rate?
[01:32:20.00] DAVID GALBRAITH: Boosted regression trees? It's a statistical technique, in the family of what I think of as species distribution modeling. But it's a technique that's really applied across multiple fields. Basically, it combines boosting and classification in regression trees. Or a classification in regression trees, if you can think of any kind of a tree diagram, like a family tree, say, where you've got one person.
[01:32:50.17] Well, that's kind of poor example. But, basically, you have different nodes or levels of branches along this decision tree. And in each one of them, you're picking a variable and saying, OK, if it's a slope greater than say 2%, it goes over to this side. And if it's on the other side of that, it goes to this side.
[01:33:13.94] And so it partitions the data into different scenarios, in our case, either presence or absence of phragmites. So what the boosting does is combines a number of these, like thousands of these, different trees together with some sort of a loss rate applied to each one.
[01:33:34.06] So like your first trees are going to explain the bulk of the variability in the data. And by using a loss rate, you can bring out relationships that that first tree might not have identified but are still important to explaining the overall variability.
[01:33:56.29] AUDIENCE: So I'm assuming that these cause all sorts of problems, and that's why you're trying to find them and potentially stop them. I have two questions, I guess. Do we know how these were introduced? And is there any attempt at controlling their growth right now?
[01:34:14.49] DAVID GALBRAITH: There is. For the first thing, it's a Eurasian strain. The theories that seem the most plausible are ballast water, packing material, planted intentionally, for erosion control or for landscaping. But it's sort all over the place.
[01:34:33.22] And when you look at the basin-wide distribution, yeah, it kind of follows. It seems to be more prevalent closer to ports, so the ballast water idea makes a lot of sense. But then there are a lot of other things that tend to be most common where there are ports, like development.
[01:34:50.51] And so whether it go moved around, most recently, by earth moving activities. It does reproduce extremely aggressively through rhizomes and its own root fragments as well as also really, successfully through seeds, which can be wind transported.
[01:35:10.57] So there's a huge amount of uncertainly there. And there's really not a lot of good ways of getting after it. I'm sorry, remind me, the second half of your question.
[01:35:20.96] AUDIENCE: Are there any attempts at controlling it?
[01:35:23.77] DAVID GALBRAITH: Yes, all over the place. Effective control really requires a mix of herbicide application and then follow up mechanical removal of the material. So you give native plants a chance to come in. But there are also some innovative control strategies that one of the other researchers on this project is heading up an effort on.
[01:35:50.41] There are some folks that he partners with, out at Wayne State, that are looking at gene silencing techniques, so trying to cut back on either their vegetative or seed reproductive success.
[01:36:04.30] And then also, he's partnered with some folks, out at the University of Washington, that are looking at species specific controls for the mychorrhizae that are symbiotic.
[01:36:18.75] It's this endophyte-type of relationship, where they make a plant much more successful, based on their association with a specific fungus, in a specific plant, and the relationship that takes place within the vascular tissue and the root systems.
[01:36:36.52] And so the thought is, there, if we can get after controlling the fungus, that's specific to this plant, hopefully, we can knock it back that way and not have a negative impact on other plants, the way just a broad spectrum of herbicide does.
[01:36:52.71] TIM GRIMES: We have time for one more question. Right here.
[01:36:57.43] AUDIENCE: So are the phragmites a problem mostly in the Michigan basin region or are these elsewhere in the US as well? Can this transformation and stuff you've been working on be translatable to other regions and what they're doing? Is there a problem there?
[01:37:14.89] DAVID GALBRAITH: There are problems with phragmites all across the country. For the most part, where it's more of a problem than here varies from place to place. But it is an issue. Invasive phragmites is an issue across the country.
[01:37:28.68] As far as how transferable these results are, I think the methods are really transferable. But taking the findings of what environmental controls our most active, here, in the Great Lakes basin? I mean we saw, just from the upper and lower basin, those relationships change. So I'd be really hesitant to use those relationships as sort of management type of, well, if we can control development here, it's going to have that kind of relationship. I think that would be a bit of an overreach.
[01:38:01.62] TIM GRIMES: OK, that's just about all the time we have. Thank you, so much, everyone, for coming. And thank you to our speakers. Thank you.
[01:38:08.94] [APPLAUSE]
[01:38:12.84] [MUSIC PLAYING]
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September 19, 2012 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

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