Efforts to understand and respond to effects of climate change on Minnesota Lakes

Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Section of Fisheries are partnering with other federal and state agencies, academia, local units of government, and citizen volunteers to better understand and respond to the potential effects of climate change on Minnesota’s glacial lake resources and fish communities.

The first effort is dubbed “Sustaining Lakes in a Changing Environment” or SLICE. SLICE is designed to understand, predict, and respond to the outcomes of major drivers of change such as development, agriculture, invasive species, and climate change on lake habitats and fish populations. Climate change has the potential to exacerbate the harmful effects of other watershed or in-lake perturbations. We are exploring processes and mechanisms at the watershed scale that drive patterns in water quality and fish habitat in a diverse set of 24 sentinel lake watersheds spread across the state’s major land types (See Lake Map).

Our approach is to augment ongoing ‘snapshot’ data collection efforts in many MN lakes with an intensive focus to understand processes in a few representative sentinel systems. This represents a novel and promising direction in water resource and fisheries management. Further, cooperation with multiple entities charged with aquatic resource management ensures rigor (e.g., the right people doing the job), efficiency, relevance, and shared ownership in common-held goals.

The first phase of SLICE runs from 2008 – 2011. Partners are collecting comprehensive datasets on watershed stressors, water quality, zooplankton, aquatic plants, and fish populations. These datasets are informing comprehensive baseline reports for each sentinel lake to form the foundation of future explorations. Analysis teams will also be busy in 2011-2012 identifying a set of lake habitat and fish indicators that exhibit little natural variability but respond predictably across a gradient of lake habitat conditions. These results will be used to set a long-term monitoring schedule; moving SLICE into its implementation phase.

Minnesota DNR Fisheries is also participating in a large-scale research project sponsored by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) focused on the effects of climate change on fish habitat. DNR Fisheries researchers will team up with the Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) at the University of Minnesota (Duluth) to investigate the effects of climate and land use change on cisco (tullibees) in a number of Minnesota lakes. Populations of cisco in Minnesota are especially vulnerable to climate change, because the state is in the southern part of the species range. A requirement for cold, well oxygenated water make cisco an excellent indicator species for understanding the effects of climate change on many of our deeper lakes in the state.

The USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Climate Center (http://nccw.usgs.gov/) is funding this research so state management agencies can develop climate change adaptation strategies. Deep lakes with exceptional water quality will be specifically targeted because they will represent important sanctuaries for coldwater fish in a climate-warmed Minnesota. After identifying these potential refuge lakes, watershed protection efforts can be initiated that will protect these systems from any additional nutrient enrichment that would likely exacerbate climate-induced losses of cisco thermal habitat. Landscape ecologists at NRRI will assist with modeling the effects of climate and land use change on cisco habitat using newly developed, downscaled climate and land use projections that allow for analysis at very high geographic resolutions. Results of the Minnesota cisco study will be integrated with the analyses of several other state, federal, and university research partners who will be studying the effects of climate and land use change on fish habitat in the Rocky Mountain West, Desert Southwest, and Northeast US. The research will allow state management agencies like the Minnesota DNR to develop strategies that strengthen the resilience of fish habitat in lakes and streams against the effects of climate change.

For further information regarding SLICE contact SLICE coordinator Ray Valley ray.valley@state.mn.us

For further information regarding The Cooperative USGS climate change grant contact Peter Jacobson peter.jacobson@state.mn.us