Scientific research plays a crucial role in supporting the safety and prosperity of tens of millions of people who live, work, and recreate in the Laurentian Great Lakes. Cuts to US federal funding, programs, and agencies threaten this research enterprise. As scientists and collaborators at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, we make the case for the value of Great Lakes research in terms of human health and safety, economic prosperity, and society’s capacity to confront major challenges today and in the future. The successful track record of scientific research in the Great Lakes shows that it provides return on investment by protecting and restoring the ecosystem, supporting human well-being, and stimulating a thriving economy. Without this continued investment, the future of the Great Lakes and those depending on them is in peril.

Abstract Traditionally, ecosystem restoration has focussed on standard ecological indicators like water or habitat quality, species population abundance or vegetation cover to determine success. However, there is growing interest in how restoration might impact people and communities. For example, researchers have documented positive socio‐ecological links between restoration and human well‐being indicators like property value, natural hazard mitigation, recreation opportunity and happiness. Furthermore, public health benefits from restoration have been linked to public support for programmes. Drawing from this research, the United Nations declared 2021–2030 the ‘Decade of Ecosystem Restoration’ and set a goal to promote more socio‐ecological goals in ecosystem restoration. Nonetheless, there is still a lack of information on the extent to which restoration practitioners consider well‐being because many granting programmes only require ecological goals and monitoring. To explore how restoration practitioners design, implement and measure the success of their projects, we used the federally funded Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) as a case study. Since 2010, GLRI has awarded over $3.5 Billion to over 5300 projects across the midwestern United States, but it does not presently require human well‐being considerations. We performed an online survey targeting project managers with a sample of GLRI projects (N = 1574). We received 437 responses and found that almost half set a human well‐being goal, and more than 70% of those who did believe they reached it. In comparison, 90% of project managers believed they met their ecological goals. These documented perceptions of positive impacts for both people and nature suggest that restoration may already transcend traditional indicators and monitoring for socio‐ecological metrics could capture many ‘unseen’ benefits. Therefore, we recommend that ecosystem restoration programmes adopt a socio‐ecological lens to document the full extent of their restoration outcomes. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

To ensure the long-term sustainable use of African Great Lakes (AGL), and to better understand the functioning of these ecosystems, authorities, managers and scientists need regularly collected scientific data and information of key environmental indicators over multi-years to make informed decisions. Monitoring is regularly conducted at some sites across AGL; while at others sites, it is rare or conducted irregularly in response to sporadic funding or short-term projects/studies. Managers and scientists working on the AGL thus often lack critical long-term data to evaluate and gauge ongoing changes. Hence, we propose a multi-lake approach to harmonize data collection modalities for better understanding of regional and global environmental impacts on AGL. Climate variability has had strong impacts on all AGL in the recent past. Although these lakes have specific characteristics, their limnological cycles show many similarities. Because different anthropogenic pressures take place at the different AGL, harmonized multi-lake monitoring will provide comparable data to address the main drivers of concern (climate versus regional anthropogenic impact). To realize harmonized long-term multi-lake monitoring, the approach will need: (1) support of a wide community of researchers and managers; (2) political goodwill towards a common goal for such monitoring; and (3) sufficient capacity (e.g., institutional, financial, human and logistic resources) for its implementation. This paper presents an assessment of the state of monitoring the AGL and possible approaches to realize a long-term, multi-lake harmonized monitoring strategy. Key parameters are proposed. The support of national and regional authorities is necessary as each AGL crosses international boundaries.

Conservation programs have been slow to integrate socio-economic indicators into decision making despite growing recognition that addressing social-ecological systems improves outcomes for nature and people. Our goal was to identify small, comprehensive sets of socio-economic indicators for conservation programs designed to (1) improve agricultural soil health and reduce sediment and nutrient loading to freshwater systems, (2) restore Great Lakes coastal wetlands, and (3) implement green stormwater infrastructure in cities. We piloted a structured decision-making process to select indicators more objectively and transparently. Important elements of our process were (a) using a human quality-of-life framework to identify potential indicators and (b) evaluating indicators' relevance to conservation, resonance with communities, and data-availability. The programs identified 278 potential indicators across seven quality-of-life domains, of which 78 were evaluated against six selection criteria. For each program, we developed intended use scenarios, assigned relative weights to selection criteria, and used these weights to calculate a weighted sum of the indicator's criteria scores and rank indicators. Across programs and intended uses, 21 indicators achieved top-five rankings; indicators for flood risk and damage were common across all three programs. Our collaborative approach provided opportunities to evaluate indicator selections across quality-of-life domain, conservation program, and intended uses.

There are many definitions of resilience, and a growing body of literature suggests that how resilience is defined may have significant consequences for planning and policy making outcomes. In the Great Lakes Region, resilience is gaining increasing attention from planners and policy makers in response to more frequent disruptions to social-ecological systems and built environments from coastal hazards. There has not yet been extensive research into how resilience is being defined in practice and how these definitions can affect geographies of risk and resilience and contribute to varying ecological, social, cultural, political, and economic outcomes. In this paper, we analyzed how stakeholders engaged in natural resource management activities within the Laurentian Great Lakes coastal environment define resilience and discuss the implications for planning and policy making through a critical geography and critical space lens. We systematically reviewed gray literature published by these stakeholders to document definitions of resilience. We then applied a 5Ws + H of resilience framework-resilience for whom, what, where, when, why, and how-to develop descriptive statistics and qualitatively analyze the definitions, considering the potential implications for ongoing regional planning and policy making efforts. Our analysis revealed a large degree of variation in the definitions, although we note two distinct gaps. We discuss how these gaps could affect ongoing regional planning and policy making efforts, and we lay out four research needs to inform planning and policy making going forward. (c) 2022 International Association for Great Lakes Research. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Groundwater historically has been a critical but understudied, underfunded, and underappreciated natural resource, although recent challenges associated with both groundwater quantity and quality have raised its profile. This is particularly true in the Laurentian Great Lakes (LGL) region, where the rich abundance of surface water results in the perception of an unlimited water supply but limited attention on groundwater resources. As a consequence, groundwater management recommendations in the LGL have been severely constrained by our lack of information. To address this information gap, a virtual summit was held in June 2021 that included invited participants from local, state, and federal government entities, universities, non-governmental organizations, and private firms in the region. Both technical (e.g., hydrologists, geologists, ecologists) and policy experts were included, and participants were assigned to an agricultural, urban, or coastal wetland breakout group in advance, based on their expertise. The overall goals of this groundwater summit were fourfold: (1) inventory the key (grand) challenges facing groundwater in Michigan; (2) identify the knowledge gaps and scientific needs, as well as policy recommendations, associated with these challenges; (3) construct a set of conceptual models that elucidate these challenges; and (4) develop a list of (tractable) next steps that can be taken to address these challenges. Absent this type of information, the sustainability of this critical resource is imperiled.

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), designed to restore and protect the ecology of the Laurentian Great Lakes, is one of the largest environmental funding programs in the United States. Over 5,400 grants have been awarded in the last 11 years (2010-2020), representing over $3.5 billion in federal spending. A publicly available database that contains a written description about each grant is available online. However, analysis cannot easily be performed given that the descriptions are only textual. Therefore, we applied a modified version of the Conservation Action Classification (CAC 2.0), an established framework from the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation, to synthesize the number of restoration actions, target species, and specific threats mentioned using thematic content analysis. The framework was modified to expand the CAC 2.0 by adding actions specific to GLRI. For example, we created typologies for the monitoring performed, site stewardship actions, and maritime ballast management practices. Based on this tally, we provide a summary of all the GLRI efforts to date. In addition to the more widely known restoration actions, we also describe the extent of educational, capacity building, and the non-monetary value projects that considered human wellbeing and/or focused on traditional ecological knowledge, recreation, or public outreach and engagement. Finally, we conclude with a discussion about the state of GLRI, the extent of the social or community-oriented efforts, and possible areas for adaptive management. This systematic coding process, and our shared supplementary data, can assist future GLRI research and strategic planning.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Indicators are essential, yet often overlooked and undervalued, elements of conservation planning. This is concerning given that selection and implementation of indicators is vital to monitoring, evaluation and learning and can require substantial investment of resources. While indicators are critical for successful program management, indicator selection is rarely approached as a discrete process, subsequently reducing transparency and increasing the likelihood of selection biases. There are many characteristics of a good indicator, such as how easily it is understood by key audiences or how easily it can be measured. As a result, choosing indicators, like choosing management actions, is inherently a value-based judgement because decision-makers must decide which indicator characteristics are most important among many options. We recommend using a structured selection process to deconstruct decision complexities, thereby increasing transparency, reducing selection biases and improving communication among participants involved in the selection process. We demonstrate the value of structured processes by using a PrOACT approach, which is an acronym for the key elements of decision making – Problem, Objectives, Alternatives, Consequences, and Tradeoffs. Operationalizing PrOACT elements within a structured framework involves (1) clarifying the decision problem, (2) specifying objectives for the decision, (3) developing imaginative alternatives, (4) understanding the consequences of your alternatives given the stated objectives, and (5) grappling with tradeoffs. We illustrate how this framework can be incorporated into indicator selection with examples from environmental programs and a case study that demonstrates how to operationalize a structured indicator selection process. Programs often achieve the first three elements – Problem, Objectives, and Alternatives – during indicator selection, but fail to fully address and document the Consequences and Tradeoffs of their decisions. By using a comprehensive PrOACT approach, programs, especially those with complex socio-ecological systems or risk-averse decision contexts, can systematically deconstruct the indicator selection process to more objectively and transparently assess these consequences and tradeoffs so the best possible selections can be made.

In many applications, conservation organizations depend on one species to indicate the presence of another. While extensive research has gone into methods for selecting these indicator species, few studies have directly measured the performance of indicator species in guiding conservation actions. Here, we evaluated whether a small number of indicator species could be used to efficiently select barrier removal projects to restore breeding habitat access for many other Great Lakes migratory fishes in the highly fragmented tributaries of the North American Great Lakes. First, we used a dataset of the historical distributions of 35 species of native migratory fishes to identify four clusters of co-occurring species, and then selected an indicator species for each cluster based on within-group co-occurrence or range width. We evaluated the utility of these indicator species by using upstream habitat and removal costs for 103,894 dams and road culverts across 1800 tributaries of the Great Lakes. We compared the potential increase in accessible tributary habitat for each species when barrier removals were prioritized to maximize benefits for (1) each species itself, versus (2) possible indicator species. We found that for 80% of the species, habitat gains from indicator-based project selection were at least 75% of the maximum gains possible under species-specific planning. However, a small subset of species would receive few habitat gains under indicator-directed project selection. Overall, our findings suggest that a suite of indicator species could be an efficient basis for planning restoration efforts for a majority of native migratory fishes in the Great Lakes.

In May 2017, the African Great Lakes community convened for a region-wide conference in Entebbe, Uganda. The African Great Lakes Conference (AGLC) focused on 6 regionally-important themes, and 300+ attendees presented over 100 talks and posters. The AGLC culminated in the adoption of a set of Conference Resolutions designed to direct the future of African Great Lakes conservation and management. As an Introduction to this Journal of Great Lakes Research special section on African Great Lakes, we report on the impetus for the African Great Lakes Conference as well as discuss three major advances and investments that were a direct result of conference resolutions adopted at the meeting. First, we present the AGLC Resolutions, a set of management issues and solutions developed at the conference. Second, we discuss the African Great Lakes Conference Fund, a conservation fund that has awarded $500,000 USD to launch four new initiatives. Finally, we describe African Great Lakes Inform, a knowledge management platform designed to promote collaboration in the region. The AGLC in general, and these three major conference outcomes specifically, provide a set of basic building blocks to advance partnerships, research and capacity in the African Great Lakes region.

Conservation practitioners face difficult choices in apportioning limited resources between rare species (to ensure their existence) and common species (to ensure their abundance and ecosystem contributions). We quantified the opportunity costs of conserving rare species of migratory fishes in the context of removing dams and retrofitting road culverts across 1,883 tributaries of the North American Great Lakes. Our optimization models show that maximizing total habitat gains across species can be very efficient in terms of benefits achieved per dollar spent, but disproportionately benefits common species. Conservation approaches that target rare species, or that ensure some benefits for every species (i.e., complementarity) enable strategic allocation of resources among species but reduce aggregate habitat gains. Thus, small habitat gains for the rarest species necessarily come at the expense of more than 20 times as much habitat for common ones. These opportunity costs are likely to occur in many ecosystems because range limits and conservation costs often vary widely among species. Given that common species worldwide are declining more rapidly than rare ones within major taxa, our findings provide incentive for triage among multiple worthy conservation targets.

Federal agricultural land use policies in the United States aimed at protecting soil health and water quality typically rely on persuading individual farmers to voluntarily adopt conservation practices. An expanding body of literature suggests that private sector intermediaries, such as crop advisers, are increasingly trusted sources of information for farmers about conservation practices and thus may be persuasive actors in the conservation adoption realm. While previous studies have explored farmers' perceptions of crop advisers facilitating conservation practice adoption and participating in conservation programs in agricultural landscapes, little research to date has explored crop advisers' perceptions of this role, and few agricultural land use policies have explicitly included crop advisers as conservation partners. This study fills a critical void in the literature by evaluating the Saginaw Bay Regional Conservation Partnership Program, an innovative agricultural policy that relies on crop advisers to recruit farmers into the program and assist them with the adoption of conservation practices. Through a survey and interviews with crop advisers in the Saginaw Bay watershed in Michigan, USA, we explore crop advisers' perceptions of their role in the program and of delivering conservation information to farmers. We found that crop advisers have positive attitudes towards land/water resources and conservation practices, believe they have an important intermediary role to play in facilitating conservation practice adoption, and believe their supervisors are supportive of them promoting conservation. However, difficulties in collaboration and communication between the private and governmental sectors resulting from perceived differences, operational differences, and territoriality present a key barrier to crop advisers increasing their intermediary role in the promotion and implementation of federal conservation programs. Future research and policy initiatives should explore how to address public-private territoriality and whether crop advisers should be incentivized to deliver information about conservation practices and/or assist in enrolling farmers in federal conservation programs.

A hallmark of industrialization is the construction of dams for water management and roads for transportation, leading to fragmentation of aquatic ecosystems. Many nations are striving to address both maintenance backlogs and mitigation of environmental impacts as their infrastructure ages. Here, we test whether accounting for road repair needs could offer opportunities to boost conservation efficiency by piggybacking connectivity restoration projects on infrastructure maintenance. Using optimization models to align fish passage restoration sites with likely road repair priorities, we find potential increases in conservation return-on-investment ranging from 17% to 25%. Importantly, these gains occur without compromising infrastructure or conservation priorities; simply communicating openly about objectives and candidate sites enables greater accomplishment at current funding levels. Society embraces both reliable roads and thriving fisheries, so overcoming this coordination challenge should be feasible. Given deferred maintenance crises for many types of infrastructure, there could be widespread opportunities to enhance the cost effectiveness of conservation investments by coordinating with infrastructure renewal efforts.

Controlling invasive species is critical for conservation but can have unintended consequences for native species and divert resources away from other efforts. This dilemma occurs on a grand scale in the North American Great Lakes, where dams and culverts block tributary access to habitat of desirable fish species and are a lynchpin of long-standing efforts to limit ecological damage inflicted by the invasive, parasitic sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus). Habitat restoration and sea-lamprey control create conflicting goals for managing aging infrastructure. We used optimization to minimize opportunity costs of habitat gains for 37 desirable migratory fishes that arose from restricting sea lamprey access (0-25% increase) when selecting barriers for removal under a limited budget (US$1-105 million). Imposing limits on sea lamprey habitat reduced gains in tributary access for desirable species by 15-50% relative to an unconstrained scenario. Additional investment to offset the effect of limiting sea-lamprey access resulted in high opportunity costs for 30 of 37 species (e.g., an additional US$20-80 million for lake sturgeon [Acipenser fulvescens]) and often required ≥5% increase in sea-lamprey access to identify barrier-removal solutions adhering to the budget and limiting access. Narrowly distributed species exhibited the highest opportunity costs but benefited more at less cost when small increases in sea-lamprey access were allowed. Our results illustrate the value of optimization in limiting opportunity costs when balancing invasion control against restoration benefits for diverse desirable species. Such trade-off analyses are essential to the restoration of connectivity within fragmented rivers without unleashing invaders.

Structures that block movement of fish through river networks are built to serve a variety of societal needs, including transportation, hydroelectric power, and exclusion of exotic species. Due to their abundance, road crossings and dams reduce the amount of habitat available to fish that migrate from the sea or lakes into rivers to breed. The benefits to fish of removing any particular barrier depends on its location within the river network, its passability to fish, and the relative position of other barriers within the network. Balancing the trade-offs between ecological and societal values makes choosing among potential removal projects difficult. To facilitate prioritization of barrier removals, we developed an online decision support tool (DST) with three functions: (1) view existing barriers at various spatial scales; (2) modify information about barriers, including removal costs; and (3) run optimization models to identify portfolios of removals that provide the greatest amount of habitat access for a given budget. A survey of available DSTs addressing barrier removal prioritization indicates that barrier visualization is becoming widespread but few tools allow dynamic calculation of connectivity metrics, scenario analysis, or optimization. Having these additional functions, our DST enables organizations to develop barrier removal priorities based on cost-effectiveness in restoring aquatic connectivity.

Nonpoint source pollution from agricultural land uses continues to pose one of the most significant threats to water quality in the US, with measurable impacts across local, regional, and national scales. The impact and the influence of targeted conservation efforts are directly related to the degree to which farmers are familiar with and trust the entities providing the information and/or outreach. Recent research suggests that farmers consistently rank independent and retail-affiliated crop advisers as among the most trusted and influential sources for agronomic information, but little is understood about whether farmers are willing to receive advice from crop advisers on the use of practices that conserve soil and water, and, if so, whether crop advisers will be perceived as influential. We present survey data from farmers ( n = 1461) in Michigan’s Saginaw Bay (Lake Huron) watershed to explore these questions. Results suggest that farmers view crop advisers as trustworthy sources of information about conservation, and influential on management practices that have large conservation implications. We discuss these results, along with perceived barriers and opportunities to crop advisers partnering with traditional conservation agencies to enhance the impact of voluntary conservation programs.

Conservation scientists increasingly recognize that incorporating human values into conservation planning increases the chances for success by garnering broader project acceptance. However, methods for defining quantitative targets for the spatial representation of human well-being priorities are less developed. In this study we employ an approach for identifying regionally important human values and establishing specific spatial targets for their representation based on stakeholder outreach. Our primary objective was to develop a spatially-explicit conservation plan that identifies the most efficient locations for conservation actions to meet ecological goals while sustaining or enhancing human well-being values within the coastal and nearshore areas of the western Lake Erie basin (WLEB). We conducted an optimization analysis using 26 features representing ecological and human well-being priorities (13 of each), and included seven cost layers. The influence that including human well-being had on project results was tested by running five scenarios and setting targets for human well-being at different levels in each scenario. The most important areas for conservation to achieve multiple goals are clustered along the coast, reflecting a concentration of existing or potentially restorable coastal wetlands, coastal landbird stopover habitat and terrestrial biodiversity, as well as important recreational activities. Inland important areas tended to cluster around trails and high quality inland landbird stopover habitat. Most concentrated areas of importance also are centered on lands that are already conserved, reflecting the lower costs and higher benefits of enlarging these conserved areas rather than conserving isolated, dispersed areas. Including human well-being features in the analysis only influenced the solution at the highest target levels.

“How much conservation is enough?” is one of the most important and difficult questions to answer. In this work, we demonstrate an approach to specifically answer this question for conservation strategies designed to address nonpoint source pollution in agriculturally-dominated watersheds. We developed empirical models relating conservation investments and actions to measures of stream water quality and fish community health. Our results are consistent with other studies that demonstrate a need for extensive implementation of conservation practices in agricultural landscapes to see measurable improvements in ecological conditions. Our results also demonstrate the influence spatial grain can have on answering “how much conservation is enough?” Our coarse-grained analyses suggest that water quality in at the outlets of four watersheds could be improved to the point that water quality was no longer limiting the fish community with only about 18% of the agricultural lands treated with conservation practices and incentive payments totaling $7.7M. Yet, finer-grained subbasin analyses predict fish communities would still be limited in many tributaries of these watersheds even with ~50% of lands treated and incentive payments totaling ~$44M. Consequently, coarsegrained analyses could significantly underestimate scope of the solution needed to address these impacts to stream ecosystems. Finding balanced solutions to address agricultural nonpoint source pollution throughout the Great Lakes will require unprecedented collaboration from local to regional scales. Herein, we provide examples of how this work is supporting collaborative efforts to establish realistic ecological goals and associated performance measures and strategic implementation of practices throughout the Saginaw Bay drainage.

Additional methods and complete survey instrument to assess the ecological impact of environmental stressors in the Laurentian Great Lakes.

File List gleam_survey_ms_supp1_score_matrix.csv (MD5: fa3b7c9cbf4efb2dd00d27b78e65a138) Impact ratings (50 stressors x 30 habitats) Description This file contains the potential impact of each of 50 environmental stressors on ecosystem condition in the Laurentian Great Lakes. Data were derived from two parts of an online survey completed by scientific researchers, natural resource managers, and non-governmental organization representatives. In one part (Part III of the survey; Appendix A), respondents ranked 20 hypothetical scenarios to derive weights for 5 components of ecosystem impact (spatial extent, temporal frequency, ecological scope, magnitude of change, and recovery time). In the other part (Part IV; Appendix A), respondents rated the 5 components for each stressor in their chosen focal lake(s) and ecosystem zone(s). A weighted sum was used to derive these 0 (no impact) - 5 (highest impact)range relative ratings. In the data file, columns are environmental stressors (2 capital letters for category, and 3–4 lower case letters for stressor name); rows are habitats (lake–zone combinations). Abbreviations for lakes, zones, and stressors follow. -- TABLE: Please see in attached file. --