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 and Burlakova from the Great Lake 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 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). In 2024, CBFS participated in the collection of Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI) sampling of Lake Erie.  We continue to analyze previous efforts in Lake Ontario (2018 and 2023 data), Lake Erie (2019 data), Lake Michigan (2021 data) and Lake Huron (2023 data). 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.

CBFS is also involved in Great Lakes fisheries and native fish restoration projects. PhD student Taylor Brown continued her work 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. We started a project on Linear Inverse Modeling of Lake Ontario and Keuka Lake food webs with PhD student Alex Koeberle, Tom Stewart, Rudstam, Sethi and Watkins funded by New York Sea Grant.