Winter Limnology on the Great Lakes – Prospects and Research Needs

Dates: May 13-15, 2019

Leads: Dr. Ted Ozersky, University of Minnesota-Duluth; Henry Vanderploeg, NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory; Andrew Bramburger, University of Minnesota-Duluth; Jia Wang, NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory; Ashley Elgin, NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory

GLERL Research Program: Integrated Physical and Ecological Modeling and Forecasting icon Integrated Physical and Ecological Modeling and Forecasting and Ecosystems Dynamics

About: CIGLR is in our fourth year of hosting Summits and Working Groups focused on identifying the most pressing research and management needs to achieve sustainability in the Great Lakes. We are pleased to welcome an exciting summit to the University of Michigan this spring that seeks to better understand what happens in the Great Lakes during winter.

Evidence from the Great Lakes and elsewhere shows that winter is not a “dead season,” and that events and conditions in winter affect the rest of the annual cycle in aquatic systems. Yet, winter has remained grossly understudied in seasonally frozen lakes, including the Great Lakes. The extent of the winter knowledge gap and the rapid change in winter conditions in recent years make it vital to improve our collective understanding of winter processes through research. This summit will be the first multi-institutional meeting focused specifically on winter limnology in the Great Lakes.

From May 13-15, 2019 scientists representing academic institutions and government research agencies from the United States and Canada with expertise in Great Lakes limnology, including remote sensing, physical modeling, plankton and benthic ecology, and fisheries biology, will gather at the University of Michigan to summarize what is known, identify major knowledge gaps, and propose research priorities and opportunities for improved understanding of Great Lakes winter limnology.

The summit is being led by Dr. Ted Ozersky from the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

Goals: 1) Create an informative, accessible, attractive and citable summary of the history of winter research on the Laurentian Great Lakes (LGL), main research priorities and hypotheses for moving science forward and some ideas of how to get there. Ideally, this will be published in a “general” interest journal such as Global Change Biology (as a ‘report’-type contribution), BioScience, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, etc. 2) Facilitate exchange of ideas and catalyze future collaboration between researchers interested in LGL winter limnology.