The CBFS Great Lakes Program
The Great Lakes research program is a major part of the activities at CBFS and is led by Watkins and Rudstam. Together with Drs Karatayev, Burlakova and Barulin from the Great Lakes Center at SUNY Buffalo State University, we continued to monitor all five Great Lakes for zooplankton, mysids, and benthos, funded by EPA-Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO). We currently have funding through 2027. CBFS participates in the Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI) efforts of each Great Lake over the five year rotation. We continue to analyze previous efforts in Lake Ontario (2018 and 2023 data), Lake Erie (2019 data), Lake Michigan (2021 data) and Lake Huron (2022 data). CBFS also continued a Great Lakes Basin research collaboration with the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) known as the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR). Rudstam, Watkins, and Holeck continued leading the Lake Ontario and Lake Erie lower trophic level biomonitoring program, a cooperation between CBFS, NYSDEC, USGS, and USFWS.
A large effort in 2025 involves advancing the ability to use drones to collect acoustics data in the Great Lakes. This involves Evans, Rudstam, Watkins, Blair and Nasworthy with many collaborators at USGS. These data are used for fish assessment, for spatial ecology of fishes, and for mysid distribution and abundance.
CBFS is also involved in Great Lakes fisheries and several native fish restoration projects. Taylor Brown completed her dissertation investigating the patterns and drivers of cisco and lake whitefish recruitment across the Great Lakes basin, funded by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission with Honsey, Sethi, Weidel, Bunnell, Rudstam, and others. Another Great Lakes Fishery Commission-funded project on mysid declines in Lake Michigan (Watkins, Zhang, Rinchard, Pothoven, Warner, Rudstam) is wrapping up. In 2025 we started a new project on food web modeling of Lake Ontario using linear inverse modeling with PhD student Alex Koeberle, Tom Stewart, Rudstam, Sethi and Watkins funded by New York Sea Grant.