An extraordinary fish die-off in Lake Huron made headlines in 2025 when millions of gizzard shad accumulated near Bruce Power’s nuclear generating station, overwhelming the plant’s cooling-water intake system and contributing to a reactor shutdown.

What does fisheries monitoring look like beyond the datasets and research papers? For students Nash and Mason, the answer recently meant heading out on Lake Erie with the Lake Erie Management Unit crews to see fisheries assessment in action.

A new perspective published in Nature Ecology & Evolution brings together ideas from food-web, community and animal-movement ecology to propose a common framework for understanding dynamic hotspots.

For decades, yellow perch have been an important part of Lake Erie’s ecosystem, supporting both commercial and recreational fisheries. But in recent years, yellow perch productivity in the lake’s central basin has declined.

The Centre for Ecosystem Management (CEM) is pleased to celebrate Dr. Tim Fernandes as he begins an exciting new chapter in his career as a Research Scientist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR).

Researchers from the Centre for Ecosystem Management (CEM) at the University of Guelph recently led discussions on an emerging ecological concept at the annual meeting of the International Association for Great Lakes Research (IAGLR) and Southern Canadian Aquatic Sciences (SCAS) in Winnipeg.