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

Abstract

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, multidisciplinary , multi-stakeholder, landscape-scale monitoring program as a case example of successful application of landscape conservation design.

Ecologically Scaled Responses of Marsh Birds to Invasive Phragmites Expansion and Water-Level Fluctuations

“…2). Our focal wetlands were a subset of those monitored for the Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Monitoring Program (CWMP; Uzarski et al 2017; Uzarski et al 2019; Hohman et al 2021). The CWMP utilized a stratified random design (by Great Lake and hydrogeomorphic type) to identify which wetlands were monitored, with the condition that each wetland was ≥ 4 ha in size and had a surface water connection to a Great Lake.…”

Application of habitat association models across regions: Useful explanatory power retained in wetland bird case study

“…Urban encroachment and accompanying increases in human activities disproportionately caused degradation of associated coastal wetlands (Wires et al, 2010). Loss of inland wetlands has been highly variable across the Great Lakes basin with the greatest concentrations of wetland loss occurring in the agricultural sections of the southern portion of the basin or near urban centers (Danz et al, 2007; Detenbeck et al, 1999; Hollenhorst et al, 2007; Uzarski et al, 2019). Only 0.4% of the original wetland area remains in the Great Lakes' Eastern Corn Belt Plains ecoregion, while 70%–100% of the original wetland area remains in the forested northern portion of the Great Lakes basin (Detenbeck et al, 1999).…”

Water Quality Indicators in Three Surface Hydraulic Connection Conditions in Tropical Floodplain Lakes

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