GREAT LAKES FISHERY COMMISSION 2001 Project Completion Report Application of Decision Analysis to Great Lakes sea lamprey management

1 Project completion reports of Commission-sponsored research are made available to the Commission's Cooperators in the interest of rapid dissemination of information that may be useful in Great Lakes fishery management, research, or administration. The reader should be aware that project completion reports have not been through a peer review process and that sponsorship of the project by the Commission does not necessarily imply that the findings or conclusions are endorsed by the Commission. Introduction This report documents the completion of a two-year project funded by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to investigate the importance of uncertainty to decision-making for the Commission's sea lamprey control program. This study is closely linked to another research project under the direction of the principal investigator for this study, funded by the Michigan Sea Grant College Program. Together these two projects comprise an examination of the application of decision analysis to two Great Lakes fishery management case studies. The first of these case studies concerns the sea lamprey control program on the St Marys River, and is the subject of this completion report. The objective of this project was to develop a decision model for the St Marys River sea lamprey control program. We have completed the development of this model and will be holding a workshop April 24-25, 2001 to present and discuss the findings of our analysis. This work has been the subject of MSU PhD Student Steven Haeseker's dissertation research, which is scheduled for completion in August 2001. Haeseker has recently completed a manuscript to be submitted to the SLIS II proceedings that describes one component of our analysis – the estimation of a stock-recruitment relationship for the St Marys River lamprey population. He has presented the findings of a second component of the analysis – uncertainty concerning the spatial distribution of lamprey ammocoetes in the St Marys River – at a national fisheries conference in Toronto and a sea lamprey research meeting in Traverse City. We have also used annual estimates of trapping effectiveness and egg viability in lamprey nests to assess uncertainty in the trapping and sterile male release components of the control program. Finally, Jones and Haeseker have been working with Research Assistant and Programmer John Netto to develop a modeling tool to incorporate Compensatory Mechanisms in Sea Lamprey 4 these uncertainty analyses into a formal decision analysis. Each of these components is described in more detail below.