Great Lakes Fishery Commission

Updated 2021-09-14 18:51:28

Lake Erie -> 5.0 Environmental Objectives -> Habitat

Lake Erie environmental priorities

One of the Lake Erie Committee’s (LEC) Guiding Principles is that protection, enhancement, and rehabilitation of critical fish habitat, including tributary and nearshore spawning and nursery habitats, are required to sustain productive fisheries over the long term. Similarly, the Council of Lake Committees draft Environmental Principles aims to facilitate and promote the protection, restoration or enhancement of functional habitats across the Great Lakes that support fish stocks. In support of these environmental principles, the LEC Habitat Task Group completed an exercise in 2018 to identify and define Priority Management Areas in the Lake Erie basin.

The Habitat Task Group’s Priority Management Area exercise identified 116 functional habitats used by 139 distinct fish stocks along with potential habitat actions including site-specific actions (e.g., dam removal, fish passage, shoreline softening/naturalization) and broad-scale regional actions (e.g., watershed nutrient and sedimentation reduction initiatives, conservation of local fish stocks). The need to conduct more research on fish-habitat interactions, forage abundance, resource competition, hypoxia, and specific habitat use was also identified as a priority. The Habitat Task Group is currently working collaboratively with the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework to transition the Priority Management Area dataset into a functional GIS-based framework that would increase the usefulness and accessibility of these data for fisheries biologists, managers and other governance groups.

In 2019, the LEC used results from the Priority Management Area exercise to guide the development of the Lake Erie Environmental Priorities, which is designed to communicate and align complex fisheries management priorities among governance groups in the Lake Erie community. The Lake Erie Environmental Priorities have already been incorporated into a number of initiatives across the basin, including the Lake Erie Lakewide Action and Management Plan 2019-2023, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Great Lakes Fishery and Ecosystem Restoration program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Regional Habitat Partnerships, the allocation of funding through the NOAA/Coastal States Organization, and others.