Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Great Lakes - Northern Forest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The summary for the Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Great Lakes - Northern Forest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Geological Survey, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Great Lakes - Northern Forest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit: The US Geological Survey is offering a research project to a CESU Partner to study climatic influences on fish recruitment in Lake Erie. In fisheries science, “the recruitment problem” describes the phenomenon in which fish recruitment can vary considerably between years without large differences in spawning stock size. Recruitment variability, and a lack of understanding, limits the fisheries managers ability to predict population sizes and set fishing limits that balance conservation risks and fishery performance. As such, population assessments are often sensitive to recruitment process specifications, limiting their usefulness to managers. Understanding the relationships between fish recruitment and abiotic factors is necessary to effectively forecast fish population dynamics. In the Laurentian Great Lakes, factors such as lake elevation, ice cover extent and duration, precipitation timing and extent, and extreme wind and seiche events have been identified or hypothesized as potential influencers of fish recruitment. Shifts in these macro-scale abiotic factors may differentially affect recruitment across reproductive guilds. Management actions aimed at preservation of biodiversity in Lake Erie could benefit from population assessments that can predict community level recruitment under projected climate scenarios.