Fish Assemblages, Connectivity, and Habitat Rehabilitation in a Diked Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Complex

Turbidity Tolerances of Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Fishes

—Despite recent interest in assessing the condition of fish assemblages in Great Lakes coastal wetlands and a concern for increasing turbidity as a major stressor pathway influencing these ecosystems, there is little information on fish tolerance or intolerance to turbidity on which to base wetland assessment metrics. Existing studies have borrowed tolerance designations from the stream literat...

Rapid Invasion of a Great Lakes Coastal Wetland by Non-native Phragmites australis and Typha

Great Lakes coastal wetlands are subject to water level fluctuations that promote the maintenance of coastal wetlands. Point au Sauble, a Green Bay coastal wetland, was an open water lagoon as of 1999, but became entirely vegetated as Lake Michigan experienced a prolonged period of below-average water levels. Repeat visits in 2001 and 2004 documented a dramatic change in emergent wetland vegeta...

Assessment of remnant unionid assemblages in a selection of Great Lakes coastal wetlands

Great Lakes Nearshore Habitat Science

Humans have dramatically altered the Great Lakes basin of North America through agricultural practices, urban development, industrial and commercial activities, and introductions of non-native species (Christie et al. 1987, Steedman and Regier 1987, Edsall 1996). Stressors associated with these changes have overwhelmed natural ecosystem processes throughout the basin (Regier and Hartman 1973, S...

An Index of Ecological Condition Based on Bird Assemblages in Great Lakes Coastal Wetlands

We use bird distributions in non-forested coastal wetlands of the Great Lakes to illustrate a new, conceptually explicit method for developing biotic indicators. The procedure applies a probabilistic framework to derive an index that best “fits” an observed assemblage of species, based on preliminary information about species’ responses to human environmental disturbance. Among 215 coastal wetl...