Advanced Landscape and Lakescape Tools for Ecological Assessment and Mitigation Support

Effective restoration, degradation mitigation, and natural resource management across the American landscape requires understanding of present conditions, the “natural” potential of the landscape to support living resources, and the response of those resources to ecological changes. Success depends on, 1) extensive data to represent the diverse and widely varying geographic areas in the US, 2) understanding of the relationships between living organisms and their environments (biotic and abiotic), 3) models that effectively capture those relationships and make reliable predictions, and 4) advanced means of communicating the meaning of model projections and providing users (e.g., managers) with access to those tools and data. Research in the Great Lakes Region has advanced our understanding of how organisms respond to changes in their environments, including landscape modification, habitat degradation, and climate change. The Great Lakes Regional Aquatic Gap Analysis Project has taken us from blue lines and polygons on a map for rivers and lakes to the first estimates of aquatic biodiversity throughout the Great Lakes Region, based on extensive georeferenced databases and fish-habitat models. That research has been extended to provide some of the first projections of climate-induced regionwide changes in fish distributions. Associated work on ecological flows allows development of more effective water exploitation strategies and supports the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. We will demonstrate these ecological evaluation tools and discuss their application to regionwide habitat condition assessment, biodiversity, and climate change mitigation.