Leveraging a Landscape-Level Monitoring and Assessment Program for Developing Resilient Shorelines throughout the Laurentian Great Lakes.

Traditionally, ecosystem monitoring, conservation, and restoration have been conducted in a piecemeal manner at the local scale without regional landscape context. However, scientifically driven conservation and restoration decisions benefit greatly when they are based on regionally determined benchmarks and goals. Unfortunately, required data sets rarely exist for regionally important ecosystems. Because of early recognition of the extreme ecological importance of Laurentian Great Lakes coastal wetlands, and the extensive degradation that had already occurred, significant investments in coastal wetland research, protection, and restoration have been made in recent decades and continue today. Continued and refined assessment of wetland condition and trends, and the evaluation of restoration practices are all essential to ensuring the success of these investments. To provide wetland managers and decision makers throughout the Laurentian Great Lakes basin with the optimal tools and data needed to make scientifically-based decisions, our regional team of Great Lakes wetland scientists developed standardized methods and indicators used for assessing wetland condition. From a landscape perspective, at the Laurentian Great Lakes ecosystem scale, we established a stratified random-site-selection process to monitor birds, anurans, fish, macroinvertebrates, vegetation, and physicochemical conditions of coastal wetlands in the US and Canada. Monitoring of approximately 200 wetlands per year began in 2011 as the Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Monitoring Program. In this paper, we describe the development, delivery, and expected results of this ongoing international, multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder, landscape-scale monitoring program as a case example of successful application of landscape conservation design.

An expanded fish-based index of biotic integrity for Great Lakes coastal wetlands.

Biotic indicators are useful for assessing ecosystem health because the structure of resident communities generally reflects abiotic conditions integrated over time. We used fish data collected over 5 years for 470 Great Lakes coastal wetlands to develop multi-metric indices of biotic integrity (IBI). Sampling and IBI development were stratified by vegetation type within each wetland to account for differences in physical habitat. Metrics were evaluated against numerous indices of anthropogenic disturbance derived from water quality and surrounding land-cover variables. Separate datasets were used for IBI development and testing. IBIs were composed of 10-11 metrics for each of four vegetation types (bulrush, cattail, water lily, and submersed aquatic vegetation). Scores of all IBIs correlated well with disturbance indices using the development data, and the accuracy of our IBIs was validated using the testing data. Our fish IBIs can be used to prioritize wetland protection and restoration efforts across the Great Lakes basin. The IBIs will also be useful in monitoring programs mandated by the Agreement between Canada and the United States of America on Great Lakes Water Quality, such as for assessing Beneficial Use Impairments (BUIs) in Great Lakes Areas of Concern, and in other ecosystem management programs in Canada and the USA.