Upcoming Events

Allison Smart
Little River Band of Ottawa Indians

The presentation is an overview of tips and information about working with Tribal Governments. It covers a brief overview of where Tribal Governments are located in the Great Lakes Region, Treaty Rights in the Great Lakes Region, and tips on working with Tribal Natural Resources Staff and some of the not-so-common challenges we face.

Rick Gitar
Fond du Lac Reservation

The St. Louis River Area of Concern (SLRAOC) Remedial Action Plan describes 80 management actions that must be completed in order to remove nine Beneficial Use Impairments (BUIs) and delist the SLRAOC.  At this time, 59% of the management actions are complete, inching our way toward delisting.  In this past year, several construction projects were completed, studies were nearer to conclusion, and important interim project milestones were met.  This presentation will highlight the past year's accomplishments, the current projected BUI removal timeline, planned 2022 field work, and significant milestones expected in 2022.

David Grandmaison
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

Manoomin (wild rice) provides numerous ecological, cultural, spiritual, recreational, and socio-economic benefits to Tribal and non-tribal communities. For our Ojibwe brothers and sisters, Manoomin is a sacred gift from the Creator and is essential for maintaining community connections, food sovereignty, healthy diets, spirit relationships, and tribal traditions. Healthy stands of wild rice provide structure, cover, and food for a diverse range of species as well as contributing to important ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, erosion control, and water quality. While the St. Louis River Estuary once supported vast stands of wild rice, habitat changes and industrial impacts reduced its extent to a few small remnant patches scattered across the estuary. We provide an update on a collaborative Manoomin restoration effort which began in 2014 and includes the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, 1854 Treaty Authority, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Minnesota Land Trust, St. Louis River Alliance, and Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission. We include a brief presentation on the successes and challenges that have influenced our journey towards successful restoration and highlight future efforts to restore harvestable stands of Manoomin to the St. Louis River Estuary.

Madeline Nyblade
University of Minnesota

Manoomin, the Ojibwe word for wild rice (Dakota: Psiŋ, scientific name: Zizania palustris), provides physical, spiritual, and cultural sustenance as a sacred food and relative for Anishinaabe, Dakota, and other Indigenous peoples. This annual aquatic plant grows in shallow lakes and rivers across the Upper Great Lakes region of North America, but it has experienced regional declines since the onset of Euro-American colonization. Long-term ecological understandings within Anishinaabe knowledge systems and observations from tribal managers have revealed not only natural cycles of Manoomin abundance, but also the complex and variable nature of these oscillations. Manoomin’s natural periodicity and variability makes eco-hydrologic studies challenging, given the short-term and reductive nature of mainstream (Western) science methods. For example, previous controlled experiments and statistical analysis over several years have shown how water levels, sulfate, and bioavailable nitrogen each impact Manoomin growth and abundance. While these specific relationships explain some of the regional and short cyclical declines of Manoomin, many other declining populations of Manoomin and longer cycles of abundance remain unexplored and unexplained. Through collaborative tribal-university research, we fill this knowledge gap by comparing long-term records of Manoomin abundance, climate, water levels, and surface water chemistry of fifty lakes across the Upper Great Lakes region, including within the St. Louis River Basin. This Manoomin data was collected by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the 1854 Treaty Authority, and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. We fit a longitudinal mixed-effects statistical model to assess the trends and relationships between these variables, specifically testing tribally driven hypotheses. Our model shows a significant regional decline in Manoomin over the last 30 years. In addition to this decline, early season water levels, surface water nutrient levels and alkalinity, snowfall, precipitation, and temperature all have statistically significant relationships with Manoomin abundance. These results point to the likely impact of climate change on Manoomin abundance. While these patterns have long been known and observed by Anishinaabe and other caretakers of Manoomin, we hope this Western science analysis will support tribal advocacy for Manoomin caretaking and deepen our collective understanding of the Manoomin ecosystem.

Kirsten Rhude
Lake Superior Reserve

Over the past year the Lake Superior Reserve welcomed its first Stewardship Coordinator. Join her as she gives an overview of the program, which will focus on land and water management within the Reserve. Stewardship program priorities include conservation and restoration, increasing the Reserve’s geospatial capacity, and providing opportunities for our community to engage with and support stewardship actions. There will also be an overview of upcoming projects, such as invasive species control and ash understory plantings in the upper estuary.

Noah Pinsonnault
Lake Superior Reserve

Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis, EAB) presence was confirmed in Superior, Wisconsin in 2013 and has since led to the stress and mortality of ash trees (Frazinus spp.) along the St. Louis River Estuary corridor. EAB infestation and subsequent ash mortality threatens the ecological integrity of the estuary’s forested wetlands, which provide critical habitat for many species. To preserve ecosystem function, forest managers will plant seedlings of alternative tree species in the understory of dying ash with the aim to maintain these habitats as forested wetlands. The Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve has participated in several research projects that will aid forest management decisions. We investigated the survival and growth of three potential replacement species (Acer rubrum, Celtis occidentalis, Thuja occidentalis).  Seedlings planted in the Superior Municipal Forest were monitored for survival and growth in 2016/2017 and again in 2020/2021. Seedlings (n=648) were planted in two different elevation zones and differentially treated to assess microhabitat planting techniques and herbivory deterrent strategies. In 2021, we installed wells to document hydrologic regime differences across study sites and to calculate centimeters of unsaturated soil through the growing season. The Reserve and partners are using this hydrologic dataset and survival information to select appropriate tree species for future restoration. We hope to establish tree seedlings before complete ash mortality in the estuary. We will continue to monitor survival and growth of newly planted trees to inform our iterative restoration strategy.

Kait Reinl
Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin–Madison

There are several ecological shifts occurring in Lake Superior, particularly in the western arm and on the south shore. These include major sediments plumes, algal blooms, changing water levels, altered habitats, and pollution from contaminants. Some recent work suggests that climate change is partially responsible for these changes, but there are still major knowledge gaps regarding drivers and pathways for management. The Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative is an initiative of the Science Annex of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. This is a multi-agency and binational effort to provide science and research necessary for making management and policy decisions that protect the integrity of the Great Lakes. In summer 2021, Lake Superior was in its intensive field sampling year and included projects in the offshore, nearshore, and watershed. In this talk, we present the science and monitoring work that was done during the 2021 field sampling season, including related non-CSMI activities, as well as the major coordination efforts that took place to provide a more comprehensive understanding of nearshore processes and their connection to the watershed.

Facilitated by Tom Hollenhorst and Joel Hoffman (US EPA Office of Research and Development) and Barb Huberty (Minnesota Pollution Control Agency)

This networking session will provide a space for discussing various planned monitoring and sampling activities in the St. Louis River estuary.  We are interested in hearing about everyone’s plans and schedules as we approach the 2022 field season.  We’d also like to hear about new projects or initiatives that are starting up this year and would also like to hear about new equipment, sensors, boats, and methods (including new methods) that might be employed. Hopefully this will help identify potential areas of overlap or coordination that could make lives easier and put a bit less pressure on budgets. 

This session is meant to facilitate and leverage sharing this information. Once collated we’ll share with all the participants.  For those who can’t attend we’ll also have an online form for collecting this information.  Please be prepared to answer the following questions:

1.       If you can think of someone that should be on this list, please add them here ___.
2.       Who’s doing the work (e.g., program and people)?
3.       What will you be doing (e.g., parameters collected)?
4.       What equipment will you be using (e.g., ships, boats, canoes, samplers, etc.).  Anything new?
5.       Where are your sampling locations (e.g., descriptions or coordinates)?
6.       When will you be doing the work (e.g., target period and include frequency if more than once)?
7.       Why are you doing this sampling (e.g., sampling/project goals/objectives, regulatory requirements, etc.)?
8.       Where does your data get stored?

Success will be marked by awareness of other projects overlapping by location/time/data set, developing an audience for a data set, or spurring on collaborations around specific sites or research/management questions.

Facilitated by Andrew Slade
Minnesota Environmental Partnership

Have you seen the fish consumption advisory signs along the St. Louis River? The River is listed as an impaired water in Minnesota due to excess of mercury in the water column and in fish tissues. As a result, there are fish consumption advisories along the river, including in the Fond du Lac Reservation and in the urban riverfront communities of Duluth. 

In 2022, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is returning to the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) process that has been interrupted repeatedly over the last ten years. Many Minnesota environmental groups are urging the MPCA to have a robust civic engagement process, to ensure that all affected parties are heard and are able to guide the TMDL process. The MPCA has set up an “Interested Parties Forum” in support of this.

How will the people of the St. Louis River watershed be engaged in this important clean-up process? When will children be able to safely eat St. Louis River fish again? The session will start with some background on the mercury TMDL and then move into a larger discussion of how participants and their organizations can be involved. We will invite staff or consultants from the MPCA to participate, and also will invite a representative of the project’s Technical Advisory Team.

Julie Etterson
University of Minnesota Duluth

Coastal forests of Lake Superior have already warmed 0.6–1.7°C, which translates into a spatial climate shift of ~240 km, to conditions that formerly occurred near Minneapolis/St. Paul. This warming is causing widespread declines of common boreal tree species. Tree mortality leaves gaps that are susceptible to invasion which reduces opportunities for native trees to move to cooler refuges. Human intervention, such as “assisted migration” (intentionally moving plants north with climate change), could help smooth the transition to new resilient forest communities. In this presentation, I will describe a 10-year experiment with TNC to test the efficacy of this strategy. I will also describe a major impediment to widespread implementation of assisted migration which is simply that we do not grow enough climate-appropriate seedlings. To remedy this, I collaborated with the Northeast Regional Sustainable Development Partnership and TNC to pilot a program where small-scale farmers in northeastern MN raised tree seedlings to be sold to restoration planters, benefiting local farmers now, and local ecosystems in the future. This pilot project is on a successful trajectory that will bolster the pipeline of seedling availability while also diversifying the agronomic economy in NE MN. We are now in the process of planning a similar project for all forested regions of the state which we are calling "Minnesota Million" that will pave the way to more reliance forests while also sequestering 1.5 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents annually.

Kristen Schmitt and Danielle Shannon
Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science

Natural resources practitioners working along the St. Louis River and more broadly in Great Lakes coastal ecosystems are often working to restore coastal functions disrupted by past disturbance or management. Climate change is presenting additional challenges and has the potential to amplify existing stressors and accelerate rates of ongoing change. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science convened regional managers and scientists to develop a menu of climate adaptation strategies and approaches for Great Lakes coastal ecosystems. This presentation will describe the menu and how it can be used by natural resources managers to intentionally consider climate change in coastal management projects. It will highlight examples of pilot projects that have applied the menu concepts to their work, including a project focused on habitat restoration in Allouez Bay.

Jeremy Hartsock
University of Wisconsin Superior

Wetland plant communities at Allouez Bay, a lacustrine coastal wetland marsh, were characterized six times over years 2011 – 2020; a period of progressively increasing Lake Superior water levels that reached record-highs in 2017, and again 2019. Here, we present findings that highlight plant community responses along a continuum of rising water. Vegetation was sampled in 1 m2 quadrats along three replicate transects placed perpendicular to the shoreline that passed through three vegetation zones (submergent, emergent, and wet meadow). Along each transect, five evenly spaced sampling points per vegetation zone were defined in each year of monitoring (15 sampling points per transect). During our six sampling campaigns, we encountered eighty-four vascular plant species, seven of which were non-native. Except for reductions in total plant cover in the wet meadow zone in later years, emergent and wet meadow plant communities were only moderately affected by rising water. Percent cover of non-native species did not increase in a clear pattern, thus, temporal changes in floristic quality were non-significant at the whole site level, and mean coefficient of conservatism values ranged from 5.3 to 6.0. Aquatic vegetation in the submergent zone was most affected by rising water. Submergent zone richness declined from sixteen plant species in 2011 to zero in 2020. Temporal composition changes were predominantly driven by species turnover in the submergent vegetation zone, whereby floating aquatic species were replaced by non-floating species from 2011 to 2017, and an absence of aquatic vegetation along research transects in 2020. Tracking regeneration of aquatic vegetation is a focus of future research as unknown effects from prolonged exposure to record-high water levels may affect natural regenerative processes at Allouez Bay, and potentially at other wetlands in the estuary.

Gini Breidenbach
Minnesota Land Trust

Formerly known as the St. Louis River Landscape Conservation Design, the Lake Superior Sustainability Partnership is intended to support future collaborative actions within the St. Louis River Estuary Landscape following delisting of the Area of Concern. A set of priority topics that emerged from a set of community meetings held for the eight planning units of the estuary landscape will be presented. A brief introduction to the online Decision Support Tool developed for this effort will be provided to keep the large body of stakeholders, partners, and interested citizens informed about this important collaborative effort.

Annie Bracey
Natural Resources Research Institute

Little is known about the metapopulation structure and dynamics of common terns (Sterna hirundo) breeding at inland lakes, including the U.S. Great Lakes, where most active breeding colonies occur at managed sites. Despite intensive management and monitoring efforts within this region, estimates of the number of breeding pairs and colony sites continue to decline. For species that disperse among colonies and exhibit deferred recruitment, identifying demographic parameters that influence population change requires long-term monitoring efforts at multiple colony locations, plus abundance estimates for the population of nonbreeders. We developed a multistate integrated population model to explore the metapopulation dynamics of two common tern colonies located in western Lake Superior using 36 years of banding, recapture, and nest monitoring data (1984 – 2020). The model allowed for transition between breeding and non-breeding stages to better reflect the intricacies of breeding propensity and dispersal documented in long-lived seabird populations. Survival rates for adults and juveniles were correlated between colonies, but we were unable to identify any climate or weather variables that might explain this pattern. Natal dispersal was pronounced and asymmetrical, with a greater proportion of juveniles dispersing from the smaller to the larger colony; breeding dispersal rates were miniscule at both colonies. Annual fecundity was highly variable and site dependent. Local recruitment of subadults and breeding propensity were important demographic drivers of population growth rate at both colonies, but so was immigration. Results suggest a large but poorly estimated component of the population persists as subadult floaters. This is the first study to document metapopulation dynamics for common terns breeding in the U.S. Great Lakes. Incorporation of additional long-term monitoring data from the region would increase accuracy of survival estimates, aid in identifying factors that influence colony stability, and help determine the likelihood of regional persistence.

Stephen Nelson
Natural Resources Research Institute

The Great Lakes region is a critical stopover area for many shorebird species.  Shorebirds that migrate through Minnesota are long-distance migrants that rely on quality stopover habitat for foraging, resting, and roosting to complete their migration.  Interstate Island Wildlife Management Area is a six acre dredge spoil island that is located in the St Louis River Estuary, in the Duluth Harbor. High water levels caused significant loss of critical habitat on the island and restoration efforts were initiated by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to restore and protect the island. Although restoration efforts were targeted at sustaining the Common Tern colony, additional considerations were made for migratory shorebirds in the restoration design. We documented shorebird abundance and diversity on Interstate Island in an effort to understand how restoration efforts affected migratory shorebird stopover use. We conducted in-person surveys and deployed 16 camera traps in 2020 and 2021. We analyzed 16,110 camera trap frames and documented a total of 3,722 shorebird detections of 8 shorebird species. Our in-person surveys produced 530 shorebird detections, of 18 shorebird species. Spatial and temporal habitat use of migratory shorebirds within the context of the restoration of Interstate Island will be discussed.

Tom Prestby, Audubon Great Lakes
Dave Grandmaison, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

This project, with more than 10 partners, aims to provide a detailed knowledge base and eventual restoration of emergent marsh habitat within Allouez Bay to establish more diverse structural conditions, including a patchwork of interspersed open water and emergent vegetation or “hemi-marsh”. The project will use two years of marsh bird surveys conducted by the Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) to establish a baseline knowledge of their presence in the bay, and to inform restoration efforts in the bay. Focal breeding marsh bird species for this project include American bittern, black tern, least bittern, marsh wren, sedge wren, pied-billed grebe, sora, swamp sparrow, Virginia rail, and yellow-headed blackbird.  These species require high quality wetland habitat during breeding and migration periods; however, the availability of quality wetland habitat has declined across the Great Lakes region and is likely a contributing factor in the population declines of these bird species. Other existing data such as additional bird and vegetation surveys, relative exposure, bathymetry, and aerial photography will contribute to the knowledge base and restoration plans for Allouez Bay.