The benthic community of the Laurentian Great Lakes: analysis of spatial gradients and temporal trends from 1998-2014.

We used the results of seventeen years of Great Lakes benthic monitoring conducted by the U.S. EPA's Great Lakes National Program Office to describe the spatial and temporal patterns of benthic communities, assess their status, trends, and main drivers, and to infer the potential impact of these community changes on ecosystem functioning.

Estimation of the width of the nearshore zone in Lake Michigan using eleven years of MODIS satellite imagery.

The nearshore zone, that region of water directly influenced by its proximity to the coast, has received increasing attention in recent years. The extent of the nearshore zone has been defined by some constant descriptive feature: e.g.

Using Satellite Observations to Assess the Spatial Representativeness of the GLNPO Water Quality Monitoring Program.

The U.S. EPA's Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO) annual water quality survey (WQS) collects data at a relatively small number of stations in each lake.

Benthic video image analysis facilitates monitoring of populations across spatial scales.

In contrast to marine systems where remote sensing methods in studies of benthic organisms have been widely used for decades, these methods have experienced limited use in studies of freshwater benthos due to the general lack of large epifauna. The situation has changed with the introduction of dreissenid bivalves capable of creating visible aggregations on lake bottoms into North American freshwaters in the 1980s and 1990s. The need for assessment of densities prompted exploration of videography as a potentially cost-effective tool.

A Comparative Examination of Recent Changes in Nutrients and Lower Food Web Structure in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

The lower food webs of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan have experienced similar reductions in the spring phytoplankton bloom and summer populations of and cladocerans since the early 2000s. At the same time phosphorus concentrations have decreased and water clarity and silica concentrations have increased. Key periods of change, identified by using a method based on sequential t-tests, were 2003-2005 (Huron) and 2004-2006 (Michigan).

Great Lakes monitoring results--comparison of probability based and deterministic sampling grids.

The Great Lakes may be viewed as a coastal environment, affected by the same meteorological and physical forces as the coastal ocean. The U.S.