NSERC Food Web Alliance: Strengthening Great Lakes Science Through Collaboration
The NSERC Food Web Alliance is a recently-funded project designed to tackle a major challenge in Canada and beyond: understanding and mitigating the combined impacts of multiple stressors—such as nutrient loading, harvesting, climate change, and invasive species—on the sustainability of Great Lakes fisheries and their food webs. Addressing these complex pressures requires ecosystem management approaches that account for how ecosystem structure influences both function and resilience. To meet this need, the Alliance brings together an integrative network of scientists, managers, and partner organizations to advance world-leading research and develop tools for managing ecosystems under rapidly changing conditions.
Above: Scientists from organizations like the CEM, OMNR, DFO, GLFC, NOAA, and inSileco Inc. gather to share updates on six interconnected projects that make up the NSERC Food Web Alliance
January 7th and 8th marked the first in-person gathering of the full NSERC Food Web Alliance, bringing together scientists from a variety of agencies and universities including the Centre for Ecosystem Management (CEM), OMNR, DFO, GLFC, NOAA, and inSileco Inc. Participants shared updates on six interconnected projects focused on developing advanced food web modeling tools for the Great Lakes.
The projects span multiple levels of biological organization, including eDNA-based characterization, fish bioenergetics and behavior, lower trophic dynamics, and whole-system modeling, with increasing levels of detail and integration. The second day of the meeting focused on developing collaborative synthesis projects to identify shared patterns across the Great Lakes and to integrate modeling approaches across disciplines.
These models will enable researchers to virtually test how different management strategies and global change scenarios may influence ecosystem and fisheries resilience—the ability to maintain function and biodiversity in the face of disturbance. It was an energizing start to what promises to be a highly collaborative and productive journey.
