Great Lakes Biological Monitoring Program

Despite great improvements in water quality in 1980s, Great Lakes ecosystems constantly face new challenges, including climate change and water level extremes, habitat destruction, spills and persistent toxic chemicals, threats to water quality, and invasive species introductions. Lake monitoring is essential to understand how biological communities respond to all these changes. Since 2012, the GLC and collaborators at Cornell University have participated in a long-term biological monitoring (LTM) program across all the Laurentian Great Lakes. The EPA Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO) Biology Monitoring Program is designed to provide managers and scientists across the Great Lakes access to biological data on chlorophyll, zooplankton, mysids, and benthos to support environmental decision-making and research.

In 2022, the team of GLC scientists led by Lyubov Burlakova and Alexander Karatayev were awarded $3 million from the EPA within the project “Great Lakes Biology Monitoring Program: Zooplankton, Mysis, and Benthic Components for 2022-2028” to conduct a benthic study of the Great Lakes. This project is a combination of a benthic assessment of EPA LTM stations and the Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI) 5-year rotation of lakes. While the LTM requires sampling all five lakes at a few selected stations every year, the CSMI study focuses on an intensive survey of one lake per year. The amount of samples to be analyzed, the scope of the study, and the significance of the Great Lakes make us responsible for the largest benthic monitoring program in the Great Lakes region and one of the largest in the world.

We collect benthos (Buffalo State), zooplankton, and chlorophyll data (Cornell University) across the five Great Lakes, analyze this data, and make it available to environmental and fisheries managers. In addition to an annual survey of 57 long-term stations, a much more detailed survey is conducted on each lake every 5 years with the Coordinated Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI). We participated in CSMI surveys in 2014 (Lake Erie), 2015 (Lake Michigan), 2016 (Lake Superior), 2017 (Lake Huron), 2018 (Lake Ontario), 2019 (Lake Erie), 2021 (Lake Michigan), 2022 (Lake Huron and Lake Superior), and 2023 (Lake Ontario). Additional research projects include impact of dreissenids on the lower food web and benthic nepheloid layer, and development of remote sensing methods.