Our association with Lake Erie dates back nearly 50 years for Mohiuddin and nearly 30 years for Stuart. In 1967, Mohi joined the lab of Dr. Jacob Verduin (Southern Illinois University), a well-known pioneer of long-term monitoring on Lake Erie, sampling its flora from 1948 to 1962 (Verduin, 1964) at Put in Bay in the western basin. Mohi became acquainted with Lake Erie flora by analyzing samples in Jacob's lab and then moved to Canada to join Dr. Richard Vollenweider's lab in Burlington, Ontario. There, Mohi became immersed in Richard's intensive whole-lake monitoring program focused on phytoplankton and primary production, chlorophyll a, and major nutrients during the height of Lake Erie's first bout with eutrophication. These surveys constituted the first monitoring program conducted across all the Great Lakes, initially including lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Superior and Georgian Bay, with Lake Michigan being added later. Data from these surveys played a key role in the development of Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (Burns, 1976; IJC, 1969; Munawar and Munawar, 1976; Munawar and Munawar, 1982; Vollenweider, 1968; Vollenweider et al., 1974), which helped move Lake Erie toward a rehabilitated state by the 1990s (Ludsin et al., 2001; Makarewicz and Bertram, 1991).
Efforts to continue rehabilitating Lake Erie continued during 1987-1990. A 1987 amendment to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement opened the door for ecosystem-based approaches to management through the establishment of Remedial Action Plans designed to rehabilitate local Areas of Concern, as well as broader-scale Lakewide Management Plans (LaMPs). In addition, several unique binational (Canada-USA), integrated, lakewide monitoring programs that focused on the entire food web (from plankton and primary production to tertiary consumers) were established. These programs first focused on Lake Michigan (Sprules et al., 1991) and then on Lake Ontario (Lake Ontario Trophic Transfer, LOTT: Munawar and Munawar, 1996). Due to their holistic, integrated, and ecosystemic nature, these programs were quite successful in enhancing our knowledge of large lake food webs. In turn, a similar whole-lake monitoring program was established on Lake Erie during 1992-1996 (Lake Erie Trophic Transfer, LETT). These efforts led to a monograph focused on the lower food web in lakes Ontario, Erie, and St. Clair (Munawar and Munawar, 1996). Soon after, a LETT-based symposium was held at the International Association for Great Lakes Research conference in 1996 at the University of Toronto, which by the way was the first Great Lakes conference attended by a much younger Stuart, who was a new Ph.D. student with Dr. Roy Stein at The Ohio State University's Aquatic Ecology Laboratory. The 1996 Lake Erie symposium laid the foundation for a peer-reviewed State of Lake Erie (SOLE) monograph (Munawar et al., 1999), published as an Ecovision World Monograph Series by the Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management Society (AEHMS). Almost 10 years later, Munawar and Heath (2008) coedited a comprehensive book, titled Checking the Pulse of Lake Erie, which set the stage for this AEHM special issue series focused on Lake Erie, as it was the last compendium devoted to Lake Erie. Given how much Lake Erie has changed during the past 15-plus years, which will become clearer as you navigate this special issue series, the time has come to share its new tale.
This tale begins with Science Annex 10 of the 2012 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which created the Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI) to survey each lake on a five-year cycle to support management. This binational program has the US and Canadian governments organizing CSMI activities to support LaMP efforts, in collaboration with monitoring and research conducted by other agency partners and university researchers. Past CSMI efforts have provided data and shed new insights into pelagic and benthic nutrient/contaminant loading and cycling dynamics and the broader food web (from microbes to primary producers to zooplankton and benthos to fish). The 2019 CSMI focused on Lake Erie, with monitoring and research activities centered on eutrophication and its water quality impairments (hypoxia and harmful algal blooms, HABs), which re-emerged as a problem during recent decades owing in large part to non-point source nutrient runoff from Lake Erie's vast agricultural watershed (Scavia et al., 2014; Watson et al., 2016). Due to eutrophication, hypoxia, and HABs also being a major focus of Stuart's research, with an extension to its consequences for Lake Erie's fish populations and the fisheries that they support (e.g., Briland et al., 2020; Ludsin et al., 2001; Sinclair et al., 2021; Sinclair et al., 2023), Stuart became intimately involved in the 2019 CSMI.
While many activities occurred as part of the 2019 CSMI, Stuart oversaw a major, binational effort focused on understanding how HABs and hypoxia influence food web structure and function, including the transfer of the cyanotoxin microcystin, which can accumulate in edible fish tissues and potentially be consumed by humans (Poste et al., 2011; Wituszynski et al., 2017). Mohi also became involved in this effort, which brought the two of us together for the first time.
Owing to the many agency partners involved in this effort, including Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development (USEPA-ORD) and Great Lakes National Program Office, all of which provided the vessel support and nearly all of the funding for this aspect of the 2019 CSMI program, we were able to undertake an enormous amount of sampling both inside and outside of areas with HABs and hypoxia. This effort has, in turn, generated data to support a wide array of research publications, including many that will be a part of this AEHM special issue series.
Many of the 2019 CSMI results were first presented at the 2022 SOLE meeting, which was held virtually due to the pandemic, and then soon afterwards at a Lake Erie symposium co-convened by the two of us (in collaboration with Warren Currie, DFO, and Joel Hoffman, USEPA-ORD) at the 2022 Joint Aquatic Societies Meeting (JASM) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This venue was the first face-to-face meeting since the pandemic began in 2020. The success of this JASM symposium, combined with our mutual desire to help facilitate ecosystem-based research and management on Lake Erie, encouraged us to embark in organizing this four issue series in AEHM (sponsored by the AEHMS).
Looking into the future, this plan can be viewed as analogous to a SOLE compendium. The manuscripts that will continue to be generated consist of a mix of basic research, case studies, and synthetic papers that provide a historical or contemporary perspective on the Lake Erie ecosystem and its drivers, as well as discuss monitoring, research, and modeling aimed at enhancing management in a fast-changing ecosystem.
The first special issue, entitled “Ecology of Lake Erie: Nutrients, microbes, algae, and dreissenid mussels”, was published in 2023 (AEHM volume 26, issue 4) and consists of 10 papers and a synthesis focused explicitly on nutrient loading, primary producers, and invasive mussel impacts on the lower food web. This second special issue, entitled “Ecology of Lake Erie: Chemistry, plankton & planktivory”, which includes 7 papers and a synthesis, also sheds insights into the dynamics of Lake Erie's chemistry and lower food web, but covers new topics, including mercury contamination, cyanotoxins from HABs, and larval fish feeding and community diversity.
We have many people to thank for this extensive series. First, we would like to sincerely thank all contributors for their submissions and meticulous revisions. Second, we want to thank the Associate Editors of this special issue (listed below) and the AEHM staff and editors, namely Iftekhar Fatima Munawar, Jennifer Lorimer, Susan Blunt, Lisa Elder, and Jahanara Shaikh for their persistent assistance in producing this new and unique series of high-quality articles. Finally, we are grateful to the AEHMS for supporting and agreeing to publish a large number of issues devoted to Lake Erie ecology.
Issue 2 Associate Editors
Robin DeBruyne, United States Geological Survey
Todd Howell, Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks
Jeff Tyson, Great Lakes Fishery Commission
Jim Watkins, Cornell University
We hope that this special issue series will expand your understanding of Lake Erie ecology and dynamics and help fill the void of knowledge that has existed for more than 15 years in this important and ever-changing lake.
Happy Reading!
Lake Erie map (circa 1680) from the Darlington Collection of maps, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
Lake Erie map (circa 1680) from the Darlington Collection of maps, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
