On June 27, the University of Michigan announced that it would receive a $1.75 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Integrated Ocean Observing System to research the biodiversity of the Great Lakes. Through this research project — titled the Great Lakes Marine Biodiversity Observation Network — researchers hope to determine how changes in biodiversity over time affect the lakes’ ecosystem. This study is expected to take about five years and the University is partnering with NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Oregon State University, the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission and the Great Lakes Observing System to complete it.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Casey Godwin, the project’s principal investigator and an assistant research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, said the effects of biodiversity in the Great Lakes have been less explored despite the understanding that biodiversity has a significant impact on ecosystem function.
“We know that the biodiversity of the Great Lakes is changings,” Godwin said. “But what we don’t know yet, but hope to find out through this project, is what are the effects of these changes (in biodiversity) on the ecological functions that we care about.”
Rackham student Benjamin Nicholas, who is studying ecology and evolutionary biology, said he hoped this study could help with biodiversity conservation efforts which in turn would maintain and improve ecological services such as food, flood control, air quality and fishing.
“With greater biodiversity, you have better ecosystem services like climate regulation, recreational fishing and improved air and water quality, which are incredibly important,” Nicholas said. “Making sure we can monitor how species are changing in the Great Lakes is the first step to figuring out what we might need to do to conserve them.”
This project aims to explore biodiversity of all kinds, ranging from microorganisms to larger organisms to habitats on both spatial and temporal scales by combining three technological approaches of measurement: telemetry, remote sensing and environmental DNA. To achieve this, the University partnered with three institutions that specialize in each area.
The Great Lakes Fisheries Commission utilizes telemetry technology primarily to tag fish. By implementing this technology, Godwin said they will be able to track certain species of fish and analyze their travel patterns.
“We use (telemetry) with a bit larger (organisms) in the Great Lakes such as fish,” Godwin said. “Fish don’t move around randomly; they have habitat preferences. We’ll be working with the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission to tag young Walleye, a significant fish species, with acoustic tags. So when they swim past the acoustic receiver, we will receive their location and the time information.”
Both the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory and Oregon State University are experts in satellite and remote sensing technologies that map the various types of habitats that exist within the Great Lakes.
Godwin said while seascapes, classifications for different oceanic habitats mapped out through remote sensing, have been made, similar ones are still being developed for the Great Lakes.
“If you’ve ever been out on a boat in the Great Lakes, you know the characteristics of the water: what types of plankton are present, how clear the water is and the water temperature change over different spatial scales,” Godwin said. “Sometimes they are seasonal as well. So these classifications for remote sensing need to be dynamic through time and act as living maps … we need to work on developing and modifying the seascapes classifications to better fit the Great Lakes.”
The final type of technology being used in this project is environmental DNA, which is being worked on by both the GLERL and researchers at the University.
Gregory Dick, a project collaborator and professor of earth and environmental sciences, said environmental DNA analysis is a newly developed technology that identifies organisms present in the water through microorganisms and other biological matter.
“You can take a sample of lake water to collect the particles in that water and extract in sequence the DNA which gives you information about what organisms are present or maybe even were present in recent times,” Dick said. “That would include all these microorganisms in the water, but even larger animals like fish and mussels are constantly shedding skin cells and feces that leave their DNA behind in the water as well. This is an exciting technology, as it gives us a relatively quantitative and unbiased view of what is in the water and it is faster and cheaper than if you were to look under a microscope.”
Dick believes that by combining all three technologies, researchers can better examine the biodiversity of the Great Lakes on multiple different levels ranging from the microscopic scale to the greater habitat scale.
“It is the integration of environmental DNA, these remote sensing technologies and telemetry that is somewhat unique and allows us to look at biodiversity across different scales from sort of microscopic scales to Great Lake scales,” Dick said.
Godwin said he believes that the Great Lakes Observing System will help take the research from the study and make it available to the public in an understandable way.
“There’s all these identified needs in the public for data and what they do is they help take ones and zeros streaming off some buoy instrument and turn it into a tool for those people,” Godwin said. “They are going to help us do that with this biodiversity information to make sure that it is not just a product that serves researchers but it is also available and useful for people that have an interest in Great Lakes biodiversity and ecology.”
Daily Staff Reporter Alyssa Tisch can be reached at tischaa@umich.edu.
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