Overview of Funded Projects

Rewired Great Lakes Food Webs: Implications for Fish Production and Resilience

Funding Entity: NSERC Alliance ($1.18m awarded August 2024)

Principal Investigators: Dr. Kevin McCann, Dr. Joey Bernhardt, Dr. Aaron Fisk / Collaborators: Dr. Bailey McMeans, Dr. Robert Hanner

This project addresses a significant challenge in Canada: mitigating the impact of multi-stressors (nutrients, harvesting, climate change, invasive species) on the sustainability of the Great Lakes fisheries and their food webs. There has been a growing need both within Canada and globally to develop ecosystem management techniques that seek to understand and manage for the structure-function and structure-resilience relationships that belies diverse complex ecosystems. This endeavor includes a highly integrative (from managers to scientists) network of interest groups to produce world-leading research in ecosystem management under changing conditions.

Towards Understanding and Managing for Critical Timing Windows

Funding Entity: Department of Fisheries & Oceans ($250k awarded August 2024)

Principal Investigators: Dr. Kevin McCann, Dr. Joey Bernhardt

This project has been designed to develop scientific knowledge to support strategies for mitigating impacts during nearshore construction. We aim to estimate species impact risks over time, thereby providing a foundation for management strategies that establish timing windows to minimize harm (e.g., disrupted reproduction or foraging). Disturbing critical life history events can have lasting effects on fish populations, and our research will help refine timing-based management for nearshore development. An easy-to-use Shiny app that can be used to produce first estimates of risk analysis of given timing windows in given geographical zones will be one of the products of this project.

watershed assessment and management (wam) network

[still in application stage]