Sustaining Lakes in a Changing Environment - SLICE

SLICE – Short-term and Long-term Goals Short-term - 3-yr LCCMR pilot project “Sentinel lakes project” Long-term – revision to the lake survey program

SLICE Long-term goals 1.Identify and monitor key ecosystem stressors 2.Evaluate effects of stressors on lake habitats and fish communities 3.Simulate changes to lake habitats and fish communities with changing stressor levels 4.Outline and evaluate management actions designed to mitigate stressors and protect resilience mechanisms in lakes

SLICC Short-term goals Result 1: –Establish baseline conditions and evaluate historic and recent changes to habitat and fish communities in sentinel lakes representative of Minnesota

Short-term goals cont’d. Result 2: –Simulation of the outcomes of climate change, urban development, and agricultural practices on habitats in the sentinel lakes.

Short-term goals cont’d. Result 3: –Identification of a set of habitat and fish indicators sensitive to human caused disturbances to serve as an early warning sign of lake ecosystem stress.

Short-term goals cont’d. Result 4: –Design of a robust, long-term SLICC program that will give us statewide inference into current status of lakes and forecast change due to different environmental and management scenarios.

Result 1: Establish baseline conditions and evaluate historic and recent changes to habitat and fish communities in sentinel lakes representative of Minnesota Strategies: 1.Acquire a set of sentinel lakes with good historic data sets. 2.In each lake, evaluate current status of individual indicators based on expectations from other similar lakes 3.Develop a holistic metric of lake “health” based on combined status of individual indicators.

Result 2: Simulation of the outcomes of climate change, urban development, and agricultural practices on habitats in the sentinel lakes. Strategies: 1.Establish flow monitoring stations in sentinel lakes 2.Mass-balance watershed modeling to assess P- loading into sentinel lakes 3.Lake modeling to assess changes in flow, P- recycling, DO, and temp regimes. 4.Simulate outcomes of changes in watershed impervious surface, precip., macrophyte cover, etc. in the sentinel lakes to understand consequences of watershed and climate change

Result 3: Identification of a set of habitat and fish indicators sensitive to human caused disturbances to serve as an early warning sign of lake ecosystem stress. Strategies: 1.Collect data on a range of fish and habitat parameters repeatedly over 3 yrs 2.Evaluate sensitivity of indicators to stressors and appropriate level of sampling for long-term SLICE 3.Identify potential cause-effect relationships between stressors and indicators and redundancy of some indicators 4.Outline expectations for long-term changes in indicators given different scenarios

Strategies: 1.Design a sampling strategy that incorporates intensive sampling in sentinel lakes and lighter sampling in a larger set of random lakes 2.Identify key indicators to measure in sentinel and random lakes 3.Identify a design that will give us greater statewide inference into health of lakes while maintaining current programs that are effectively delivering local fisheries management Result 4: Design of a robust, long-term SLICE program that will give us statewide inference into current status of lakes and forecast change due to different environmental and management scenarios