Explore a range of collaborative projects led by our team in partnership with agencies like Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR). From early career research initiatives to established investigator projects, these research efforts reflect our shared commitment to advancing ecosystem science and informing resource management in the Great Lakes basin.
Funding Entity: NSERC Alliance ($1.18m awarded August 2024)
Principal Investigators: Dr. Kevin McCann, Dr. Joey Bernhardt, Dr. Aaron Fisk / Collaborators: Dr. Bailey McMeans, Dr. Robert Hanner
This project addresses a significant challenge in Canada: mitigating the impact of multi-stressors (nutrients, harvesting, climate change, invasive species) on the sustainability of the Great Lakes fisheries and their food webs. There has been a growing need both within Canada and globally to develop ecosystem management techniques that seek to understand and manage for the structure-function and structure-resilience relationships that belies diverse complex ecosystems. This endeavor includes a highly integrative (from managers to scientists) network of interest groups to produce world-leading research in ecosystem management under changing conditions.
Individual Projects:
Lake Erie harvest resilience implications (Drs. Yodzis, Hale, and Brimacombe)
Ecosystem/food web indicators (PhD candidates Reilly O’Connor and Charlotte Ward)
Funding Entity: Department of Fisheries & Oceans ($250k awarded August 2024)
Principal Investigators: Dr. Kevin McCann, Dr. Joey Bernhardt
This project has been designed to develop scientific knowledge to support strategies for mitigating impacts during nearshore construction. We aim to estimate species impact risks over time, thereby providing a foundation for management strategies that establish timing windows to minimize harm (e.g., disrupted reproduction or foraging). Disturbing critical life history events can have lasting effects on fish populations, and our research will help refine timing-based management for nearshore development. An easy-to-use Shiny app that can be used to produce first estimates of risk analysis of given timing windows in given geographical zones will be one of the products of this project.
Status: [grant application submitted]
Principal Investigators (CEM): Dr. Kevin McCann, Dr. Joey Bernhardt
The proposed Watershed Assessment and Management (WAM) network will provide cutting-edge instrumentation and technical expertise to assess the environmental impacts of land use that have created fast water landscapes throughout Canada. This network, involving six universities (Guelph, Lakehead, Toronto, Ontario Tech, Trent, Windsor) and the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), will utilize a genes-to-ecosystem approach to develop predictive landscape scale data that will serve as both: i) an early warning system for looming environmental impact, and; ii) produce models that aid landscape scale design.
Photo: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Why are Lake Ontario Chinook shrinking? Predator-prey population dynamics (size matching & consumption efficiency)
Status: Ongoing
Lake Ontario’s Chinook salmon fishery is one of the largest in the world, but both average and trophy fish sizes have been shrinking in recent years. While several factors may be contributing—such as warming waters, changing food supply, and shifts in lake-wide productivity—it’s been hard to pinpoint which mechanisms matter most. This project develops a model that captures key predator-prey dynamics between Chinook and alewife, embedding them within the broader Lake Ontario food web. By comparing real-world data with predictions from different ecological scenarios, the model helps test which interventions could best support large, resilient Chinook populations.
Photo: Eric Engbretson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Lake Erie walleye and yellow perch population/biomass assessments
Status: Ongoing
This project investigates what drives long-term changes in yellow perch and walleye populations in Lake Erie. Using decades of data collected by management task groups, our researchers are exploring how population trends relate to both broad environmental shifts—like climate patterns—and local factors such as water temperature, nutrient levels, and fishing pressure. The goal is to better understand how these influences interact to shape the health and abundance of these key species.
Photo: NOAA
Lake Erie harvest resilience implications (NSERC Food Web Alliance)
Status: Ongoing
This new project applies cutting-edge methods from ocean research to study how entire fish communities in Lake Erie respond to changes in fishing pressure or nutrient inputs. By feeding these human-driven changes into food web models built from real lake data, we can predict how each species is likely to respond—whether it increases, declines, or stays the same. The goal is to understand the resilience of the broader ecosystem to human impacts, providing a more complete picture of biodiversity change in the Great Lakes.
