Coastal wetlands play an important role in the Great Lakes ecosystem. They support many beneficial ecological functions, as well as economic and cultural values. Coastal wetlands are critical habitat for aquatic and terrestrial organisms, providing spawning, nursery, feeding and nesting habitat. Economic values of coastal wetlands include water quality improvement, recreation, shoreline protection, and property protection against storms and flooding. Coastal wetlands experience many stressors relating to human development, fragmentation, agricultural practices, and invasive species. There are greater than 500,000 acres of coastal wetlands across the Great Lakes basin, less than one-half of historic Great Lakes coastal wetlands. The lack of a standardized, basin-wide approach to coastal wetland monitoring motivated the EPA Great Lakes National Program Office (EPA-GLNPO) and a consortium of scientists to develop and evaluate metrics and protocols for measuring Great Lakes coastal wetland ecosystem health. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) provided funding necessary for EPA-GLNPO and a collection of academic and government entities to begin a long-term comprehensive monitoring program to determine the status and trends of coastal wetland health across all the Great Lakes beginning in 2011.
Results/Conclusions
Since the program’s implementation, over 1,000 wetland sites have been visited, resulting in 140,000 acres of wetland habitat monitored. In 2015 and 2016, data generated by this program have been disseminated to project managers and stakeholders who are proposing new restoration and management activities in competitive grant programs. Sampling protocols have been developed for five taxa groups (amphibians, birds, aquatic macroinvertebrates, fish, and aquatic plants communities), with accompanying metrics and indices. Standard protocols were also developed for accompanying chemical and physical measures used to calculate gradients of disturbance. Results from the first five-year sampling round show regional differences in coastal wetland quality. For example, the northern Great Lakes had higher wetland vegetation quality than the southern Great Lakes. Distribution of invasive species across the Great Lakes basin show Lake Ontario, western Lake Erie, Saginaw Bay, Green Bay, and northern Lake Huron having the largest number of invasive species occurrences. These data and results are being used to guide multi-agency, multi-stakeholder restoration efforts in the Great Lakes (e.g., GLRI).