Lake Victoria: Overview of research needs and the way forward

Over 42 million people rely on Lake Victoria as their primary source of food, employment, and clean drinking water. The lake's fisheries have produced around one million tonnes in recent years, but the lake's growing population has resulted in a lower catch rate per capita. And the lake and its catchment have been negatively impacted by a wide variety of human activities, such as overfishing, oil spills, discharge of untreated waste, spread of invasive species, over-abstraction of water from the lake basin, and climate change, among other drivers of change. This paper presents existing research gaps, existing capacity, and presents a way forward for priority research on issues ranging from fish and fisheries, biodiversity, pollution, invasive species, aquaculture, human population growth and socio-economics, land use changes, habitat degradation, climate change and skills and knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to document: information that is currently available from previous research; the existing scientific capacity; and the resources required to guarantee that Lake Victoria becomes a heathy and biologically diverse resource for the millions of people who are dependent on it. It is clear from this synthesis that the biological, social, and economic benefits that can be derived from Lake Victoria can only be accomplished through the utilization of multi-disciplinary approaches in the research and monitoring of both basinwide and lake-wide biophysical processes, as well as the modeling of all potential interactions between the ecology of the basin and the lake. (c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of International Association for Great Lakes Research. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).