Sustaining Lakes in a Changing Environment - SLICE

1. Sustaining Lakes in a Changing Environment - SLICE

2. SLICE – Short-term and Long-term Goals • Short-term - 3-yr LCCMR pilot project “Sentinel lakes project” • Long-term – revision to the lake survey program

3. SLICE Long-term goals • Identify and monitor key ecosystem stressors • Evaluate effects of stressors on lake habitats and fish communities • Simulate changes to lake habitats and fish communities with changing stressor levels • Outline and evaluate management actions designed to mitigate stressors and protect resilience mechanisms in lakes

4. SLICC Short-term goals • Result 1: • Establish baseline conditions and evaluate historic and recent changes to habitat and fish communities in 24-30 sentinel lakes representative ofMinnesota

5. Short-term goals cont’d. • Result 2: • Simulation of the outcomes of climate change, urban development, and agricultural practices on habitats in the sentinel lakes.

6. Short-term goals cont’d. • Result 3: • Identification of a set of habitat and fish indicators sensitive to human caused disturbances to serve as an early warning sign of lake ecosystem stress.

7. Short-term goals cont’d. • Result 4: • Design of a robust, long-term SLICC program that will give us statewide inference into current status of lakes and forecast change due to different environmental and management scenarios.

8. Result 1: Establish baseline conditions and evaluate historic and recent changes to habitat and fish communities in 24-30 sentinel lakes representative ofMinnesota Strategies: • Acquire a set of sentinel lakes with good historic data sets. • In each lake, evaluate current status of individual indicators based on expectations from other similar lakes • Develop a holistic metric of lake “health” based on combined status of individual indicators.

9. Result 2: Simulation of the outcomes of climate change, urban development, and agricultural practices on habitats in the sentinel lakes. Strategies: • Establish flow monitoring stations in sentinel lakes • Mass-balance watershed modeling to assess P-loading into sentinel lakes • Lake modeling to assess changes in flow, P-recycling, DO, and temp regimes. • Simulate outcomes of changes in watershed impervious surface, precip., macrophyte cover, etc. in the sentinel lakes to understand consequences of watershed and climate change

10. Result 3: Identification of a set of habitat and fish indicators sensitive to human caused disturbances to serve as an early warning sign of lake ecosystem stress. Strategies: • Collect data on a range of fish and habitat parameters repeatedly over 3 yrs • Evaluate sensitivity of indicators to stressors and appropriate level of sampling for long-term SLICE • Identify potential cause-effect relationships between stressors and indicators and redundancy of some indicators • Outline expectations for long-term changes in indicators given different scenarios

11. Result 4: Design of a robust, long-term SLICE program that will give us statewide inference into current status of lakes and forecast change due to different environmental and management scenarios Strategies: • Design a sampling strategy that incorporates intensive sampling in sentinel lakes and lighter sampling in a larger set of random lakes • Identify key indicators to measure in sentinel and random lakes • Identify a design that will give us greater statewide inference into health of lakes while maintaining current programs that are effectively delivering local fisheries management