Human well-being and natural capital indictors for Great Lakes waterfront revitalization.

Revitalization of natural capital amenities at the Great Lakes waterfront can result from sediment remediation, habitat restoration, climate resilience projects, brownfield reuse, economic redevelopment and other efforts. Practical indicators are needed to assess the socioeconomic and cultural benefits of these investments. We compiled U.

Deep Lake Explorer: A web application for crowdsourcing the classification of benthic underwater video from the Laurentian Great Lakes.

Underwater video is increasingly used to study aspects of the Great Lakes benthos including the abundance of round goby and dreissenid mussels. The introduction of these two species have resulted in major ecological shifts in the Great Lakes, but the species and their impacts have heretofore been underassessed due to limitations of monitoring methods. Underwater video (UVID) can "sample" hard bottom sites where grab samplers cannot.

Goals, beneficiaries, and indicators of waterfront revitalization in Great Lakes Areas of Concern and coastal communities.

Cleanup of Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOCs) restores environmental benefits to waterfront communities and is an essential condition for revitalization. We define waterfront revitalization as policies or actions in terrestrial waterfront or adjacent aquatic areas that promote improvements in human socioeconomic well-being while protecting or improving the natural capital (the stocks of natural assets, biodiversity) that underlies all environmental, social, and economic benefits. Except for economic measures such as development investments, visitation rates, or commercial activity, evidence of waterfront revitalization in the Great Lakes is mostly anecdotal.

A synoptic assessment of water quality in two Great Lakes connecting channels.

We conducted a probabilistic water quality assessment of two Great Lakes connecting channels, the St. Marys River, and the Lake Huron-Lake Erie Corridor (HEC) in 2014-2015. We compared the condition of the channels to each other and to the up- and down-river Great Lakes with data from an assessment of the Great Lakes nearshore conducted in 2015.

Water clarity measures as indicators of recreational benefits provided by U.S. lakes: Swimming and aesthetics.

Lakes provide recreational benefits related to water quality. Using data from the 2007 and 2012 United States National Lake Assessments (=2067 lake visits), we developed indicators for three benefits: swimming, general recreational value, and aesthetic appeal. For two combined ecoregions ("Mountains" and "Plains") we related objective measures of water clarity, including Secchi depth, turbidity, and water-column chlorophyll- concentration to subjective visual assessments of recreational benefit quality.

Determining preferences for ecosystem benefits in Great Lakes Areas of Concern from photographs posted to social media.

Relative valuation of potentially affected ecosystem benefits can increase the legitimacy and social acceptance of ecosystem restoration projects. As an alternative or supplement to traditional methods of deriving beneficiary preference, we downloaded from social media and classified ≈21,000 photographs taken in two Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOC), the St. Louis River and the Milwaukee Estuary.

A field observation of rotational feeding by .

, the round goby, was recorded by underwater video feeding on crushed dreissenid mussels at a depth of 12 m in Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, a Laurentian Great Lake. In the video, gobies used rotational or twist feeding to tear away particles from crushed mussels. At least 43 examples of this feeding maneuver occur in the video.

A depth-adjusted ambient distribution approach for setting numeric removal targets for a Great Lakes Area of Concern beneficial use impairment: degraded benthos.

We compiled macroinvertebrate data collected from 1995 to 2014 from the St. Louis River Area of Concern (AOC) of Lake Superior. Our objective was to define depth-adjusted cutoff values for benthos condition classes to provide an analytical tool for quantifying progress toward achieving removal targets for the degraded benthos beneficial use impairment.

Muskie Lunacy: does the lunar cycle influence angler catch of muskellunge (Esox masquinongy)?

We analyzed angling catch records for 341,959 muskellunge (Esox masquinongy) from North America to test for a cyclic lunar influence on the catch. Using periodic regression, we showed that the number caught was strongly related to the 29-day lunar cycle, and the effect was consistent across most fisheries. More muskellunge were caught around the full and new moon than at other times.

Environmental monitoring and assessment of a Great River ecosystem: the Upper Missouri River pilot.

Most Great River ecosystems (GREs) are extensively modified and are not receiving adequate protection to prevent further habitat degradation and loss of biotic integrity. In the United States, ecological monitoring and assessment of GREs has lagged behind streams and estuaries, and the management of GREs is hampered by the lack of unbiased data at appropriate spatial scales. Properties of GREs that make them challenging to monitor and assess include difficult sample logistics and high habitat diversity.

Contemplating the assessment of great river ecosystems.

The science and practice of assessing the status and trends of ecological conditions in great rivers have not kept pace with perturbation wrought on these systems. Participants at a symposium sponsored by the U.S.