Development of ecological indicators for the U.S. Great Lakes coastal region – A summary of applications in Lake Huron

Abstract

Brady, Valerie J.; Brown, Terry N.; Ciborowski, Jan J.H.; Danz, Nicholas P.; Ghioca, Dana M.; Hanowski, JoAnn M.; Hollenhorst, Tom P.; Howe, Robert W.; Johnson., Lucinda B.; Johnston, Carol A.; and Reavie, Euan D., "Development of ecological indicators for the U.S. Great Lakes coastal region -A summary of applications in Lake Huron" (2009 Niemi et al. / Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management 12 (2009) [77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89] useful indicators of the ecological condition of the Lake Huron coast. The ecological indicators provide a baseline on selected conditions for the U.S. Lake Huron coastal region and a means to detect change over time.

An integrated approach to assessing multiple stressors for coastal Lake Superior

“…In contrast, we observed that breeding bird communities in the eastern and more southerly regions of the Great Lakes were dominated by species associated with agricultural and urban landscapes such as American robin (Turdus migratorius), European starling (a European exotic), mourning dove (Sturnus vulgaris), and brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) (Howe et al, 2007b;Cutright et al, 2006) ( Figure 5). This is consistent with data presented in Niemi et al (2009;Table 3) in which the mean reference condition score based on environmental stress for the U.S. portion of Lake Superior was 6.9 compared with the next highest for Lake Michigan (5.4). However, the mean IEC based on the occurrence of 23 wetland associated bird species was 8.1 compared with the next highest for Lake Michigan of 5.0.…”

“…With its east-west orientation, the U.S. Lake Superior coast is less subject to gradients of latitude and corresponding climatic and biogeographic factors that have had a significant influence on interlake variation in wetland quality compared with other Great Lakes (Niemi et al, 2009). For the four lower Great Lakes, latitude was a significant predictor of wetland condition and was correlated with both natural and anthropogenic stressors, making it often difficult to tease out degradation due to human activity alone (Johnston et al, 2010).…”

“…The stress gradients for the U.S. portion of the Lake Superior coastal watershed was the second shortest for proportion of agricultural area (Lake Ontario was the lowest) and relative atmospheric deposition (Lake Erie was lowest), the second longest gradient of human population density (Lake Michigan had the longest), and was intermediate for cumulative stress index compared with the other four lakes (Niemi et al, 2009;Table 2). Coastal regions of Lake Superior can be found at each of the extremes of the disturbance gradients.…”

“…Site selection was based on quantifying the land-based stress in a geographic information system (GIS) for 762 coastal segment-sheds that encompassed the entire U.S. basin (Hollenhorst et al, 2007;Johnston et al, 2009a). Sampled sites were represented within the GIS by polygons encompassing the sampling points at a selected locale as described for Lake Huron by Niemi et al (2009).…”

“…Here we report selected results from the GLEI project for the U.S. portion of the Lake Superior coastal region. This summary is complementary to Niemi et al (2009), which summarized ecological indicator analyses in Lake Huron. A major incentive for this lake-specific approach to indicator development resulted from earlier studies by Brazner et al (2007a) and Hanowski et al (2007a).…”