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 Buffalo State, we continued to monitor all five Great Lakes for zooplankton, mysids, and benthos, funded by EPA-Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO). In 2023 we completed the current five-year grant that was extended for one year. The next five years has 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 2023, CBFS participated in the analysis of Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI) efforts in Lake Ontario (2018 data), Lake Erie (2019 data) and Lake Michigan (2021 data). Lake Ontario was the CSMI lake for 2023 and included two lakeside surveys.  Rudstam 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. Leveraging data from a GLRI-funded project, PhD student Taylor Brown published an analysis of larval cisco and lake whitefish spatiotemporal distributions and physical habitat use within multiple Lake Ontario embayments.   Two new projects from the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission were active: (1) on cisco and lake whitefish (Brown, Honsey, Sethi, Weidel, Rudstam) and (2) on mysids in Lake Michigan (Watkins, Zhang, Rinchard, Pothoven, Warner, Rudstam) and we collaborate with University Vermont on a third GLFC project on avoidance of acoustic survey vessels (Stockwell, Marsden, McReynolds, Jech and Rudstam). We are also starting a project on Linear Inverse Modeling of food webs with Alex Koeberle, Tom Stewart, Rudstam, Sethi and Watkins funded by New York Sea Grant.