Nearshore Community Characteristics Related to Shoreline Properties in the Great Lakes

Cumulative Habitat Impacts of Nearshore Engineering

“…Sediment and textural data were obtained from each of the profile sites and integrated with sediment distributions interpreted from bottom samples and sidescan sonar data. Biological community data were collected separately (methods described in Goforth and Carman 2005). Nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis (K-W) tests were conducted to determine whether density and CPUE data for each taxonomic and functional group were different between shoreline types (unique vs. mid-bluff) and among lake areas-Southern Lake Erie (SLE), Eastern Lake Michigan (ELM), and Western Lake Michigan (WLM)).…”

“…Most analyses were hampered by high variability within the classes that primarily resulted from regional lake effects, low levels of replication, and considerable heterogeneity of nearshore habitats encountered during the surveys (see Goforth and Carman 2005). These interactions made the results of the statistical analyses difficult to interpret, particularly because the reverse pattern of response to shoreline type occurred consistently in one of the three lake areas compared to the other two (i.e., southern Lake Erie compared to eastern Lake Michigan and western Lake Michigan).…”

Impacts of Riprap on Wetland Shorelines, Upper Winnebago Pool Lakes, Wisconsin

“…The young-of-the-year fishes showed no difference between shoreline types. Fish abundance in shallow water did not differ between developed and undeveloped shoreline types, but fewer kinds of nearshore fishes were found associated with unstable substrates (Goforth and Carman 2005). Larval fishes were not directly affected by human activities along the shoreline but were indirectly affected by water temperature and slope of the bottom (Hook et al 2001).…”

“…Other studies have focused on specific habitat components, such as aquatic macrophytes (Radomski and Goeman 2001), nearshore cover (Christensen et al 1996), substrate (Jennings et al 1999), and fish (Hook et al 2001), and variations in assessment methodologies and scale present uncertainty in integrating these to characterize ecosystem response. Although these studies generally indicate that shoreline protection projects can cause changes in the nearshore environment, including the lake bottom, the water column, and the biota (Brazner and Magnuson 1994;Goforth and Carman 2005;Trebitz et al 2009), the challenge is to understand the potential magnitude and the complexity of interactions among these factors.…”

Multiscale relationships between Great Lakes nearshore fish communities and anthropogenic shoreline factors

“…These shallow water fish communities were described using catch per unit effort measures (CPUE; number of individuals/beach seine haul), and synthetic variables were calculated based on combined CPUE of all shallow water fish captured at each site, trophic role (i.e., planktivores, benthivores, and piscivores), and origin (i.e., native and introduced fish). Such biological criteria (e.g., trophic role, indigenousness, and CPUE as a proxy for density/abundance) are commonly used to describe biological integrity of freshwaters based on fish community data (e.g., Karr 1981;Minns et al, 1994;Thoma 1999;Goforth and Carman 2005). Beach seine data were not available for three study sites (New Buffalo, Ludington State Park, and Manistee, Fig.…”