Angling for Data on Michigan Fishes

Background

Lake inventories have a long history in Michigan. The earliest lake surveys were conducted from 1883-1892 by the Michigan State Board of Fish Commissioners with the goal of evaluating the success of previous fish stockings which began in 1873. In the 1920’s, much of the lake survey work was carried out by curators at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. Early ichthyological surveys were primarily focused on documenting and describing the fish species throughout Michigan. In 1921, the newly formed Michigan Department of Conservation (now the Michigan Department of Natural Resources) began conducting ichthyological surveys in collaboration with museum curators. The Institute for Fisheries Research, which formalized the cooperation between the Michigan Department of Conservation and the University of Michigan and sought to bring a science-based approach to the emerging discipline of fisheries management was founded in 1930. Among the many contributions of the Institute was the development of standardized survey techniques and the implementation of a comprehensive inventory of lakes to determine suitable management methods.

Institute for Fisheries Research survey crew collecting water samples from Bawbeese Lake, Hillsdale County, June 1931. Photo credit Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

From 1930 through the 1960s, lake surveys were conducted by crews working out of the Institute. These surveys included characteristics of the fish community, food sources, aquatic plants, water chemistry, human development, and lake mapping. Following this foundational work, much of the lake survey responsibility shifted from research to management staff located in offices throughout the state where it continues today. Since 1995, lake survey data have been entered into an electronic database and are readily accessible. However, all of the historical lake survey information was recorded on paper cards and is housed at the Institute for Fisheries Research (IFR).

Analyzing water samples Bawbeese Lake, Hillsdale County, June 1931. Photo credit Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

Current Research

Data from lake surveys help to clarify the changes occurring in individual lakes and identify and investigate trends in the more than 11,000 inland lakes across the state of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region. Over the decades, inland lakes and freshwater ecosystems have faced a variety of pressures ranging from early watershed deforestation and shoreline development to more recent species invasions and climate change. Shrinking cold water habitat and longer summers contribute to declines in cool- and cold-water adapted fishes, like Cisco and Walleye. In contrast, fishes which prefer warm-water, like Bass and Bluegill, are more common in northern lakes than they were in the past.

Recently developed data science approaches will allow us to combine data on fish, habitat characteristics and management approaches from a variety of historical surveys in new ways. Fish surveys are rich sources of information on diversity, abundance and growth. It will be important to account for differences in the methods used to capture fish so that measures of fish abundance across lakes and through time are comparable. This will allow us to build models that explain how and why fish populations have changed over recent decades, predict what changes are likely to occur in the future, and test which management strategies will improve the resilience of fish populations.

We also are developing new ways for pairing fish specimens and field notes from the collections at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ) with data from historical surveys archived on cards at IFR. Museum collections function as ‘libraries of biodiversity’ by housing specimens as records of changes in various aspects of organisms, like size and shape, age, reproductive condition, diet, parasites and genetics. Over decades, fish from lake surveys were deposited in the UMMZ collections. New molecular, morphological and statistical methods continue to expand the usefulness of collections for understanding the relationships between organisms and their environments. Pairing specimens with detailed environmental data from the IFR records allows us to use these specimens to examine how fishes may, or may not, have adapted to changing lake conditions.

This research is a collaboration between the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the following schools and institutions at the University of Michigan:

Institute for Fisheries Research
School for the Environment and Sustainability
School of Information
University of Michigan Library
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Museum of Zoology

This research is being conducted as part of the Collections, Heterogeneous data, And Next Generation Ecological Studies (CHANGES) project at the University of Michigan, which is funded via a grant from the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS).