Great Lakes Coastal Symposium 2024

Join us for an autumn bird walk through the scenic Cobb's Hill Park in Rochester, NY. This 109-acre park boasts a unique landscape, including the Cobb's Hill Reservoir, which is a haven for waterfowl and migrating birds.

The Waters connect us all through time and space. The Waters do not know boundaries set by man. Our Mother Earth is out of balance and the urgency in which we react is dependent on our relationship with each other and the natural world. Many Indigenous people have prophesies that speak of times that we are currently experiencing, and the overall message is always surrounding being of Good Mind and maintain our reciprocal responsibilities with our Mother EarthWe can respect each other cultures, customs, and beliefs and share the bounty of what the Great Lakes offers ALL BEINGS through the guidance of the Dish with One Spoon thinking. The wampum that signified a treaty amongst many Indigenous Nations pre-contact provides the framework necessary to accomplish big changes for the good of many.

 This presentation is part of the Supporting Sediment Transport organized session.

A littoral cell is a conceptual sediment compartment that defines the supply, longshore transport, and deposition of sand and gravel along the coast in the Great Lakes. Within a littoral cell, there is typically an updrift supply area that features a long-term erosion trend, a net direction of longshore sediment transport (LST), and historically a downdrift depositional area that features a positive sediment budget and accretion trend. Understanding the sediment dynamics in littoral cells and the role of these natural physical processes have on protecting coastal ecosystems, beaches, and infrastructure is critical to developing equitable and sustainable long-term adaptation strategies to natural hazards and climate change.

The presentation will provide examples of littoral cell boundaries and sub-cell boundaries, which occur when artificial barriers are constructed that reduce the natural flow of sediments in the nearshore. New sources of sediment from shore erosion and riverine systems will be reviewed, including anthropogenic influence. The role of lake levels and storms in re-distributing sediment in the cells will be highlighted, along with potential impacts of climate change. Finally, characteristics of depositional sinks in littoral cells and examples will be highlighted.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

To address concerns over the conversion and degradation of Great Lakes coastal ecosystems, researchers and conservation professionals have developed maps, data and tools to guide protection, restoration and policy decisions. Early basin-wide prioritizations include the Great Lakes Ecoregional Plan, Biodiversity Investment Areas, and the Great Lakes Biodiversity Conservation Strategies, which varied in scope with respect to conservation targets or features and the breadth of strategies intended to be informed. Some prioritizations focused on smaller areas within the Great Lakes – such as the Green Bay Landscape Conservation Design and the Western Lake Erie Coastal Conservation Vision – to address urgent or severe threats particular to those areas. Over time, prioritizations have evolved to incorporate climate change, address ecosystem services and benefits to people. Additional prioritization efforts are underway or being planned and will continue this growth to incorporate ecological process and ecosystem functions. To provide context and potentially inform current and future prioritization initiatives, we will present a synopsis of past and ongoing initiatives, comparing them with respect to their geographic and strategic scope, breadth of consideration of biodiversity, human well-being, and other parameters, and the extent to which they integrate terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. We will also introduce a prioritization effort by The Nature Conservancy, intended to increase cross-boundary collaboration and impact of TNC’s nascent Great Lakes Coastal Resilience team, focused on the US coastal and nearshore areas.

Secretive marsh birds, such as grebes, rails, and bitterns, have received increased attention from the conservation community in recent decades due to declining populations, resulting in several species being identified as endangered and threatened at state levels and species of greatest conservation need in state wildlife action plans. Despite increased concern for these species, conservation activities targeting secretive marsh birds has been limited in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions. To meet objectives for these species identified in regional and state conservation plans, greater communication, coordination, and collaboration among partners is needed to overcome barriers hindering marsh bird habitat conservation. With support from the Upper Mississippi / Great Lakes Joint Venture, a group of partners began work in early 2023 to create a framework that would provide the information and tools needed to deliver increased conservation activity for marsh birds. We will describe the process used to develop the framework and give an overview of the resulting vision, mission, goals, objectives, and strategies. We will also provide details on our plans for implementation, highlight current activities, and describe opportunities for people to get involved.

This presentation is part of the Supporting Sediment Transport organized session.

Coastal erosion and the impacts associated with it such as infrastructure damage and habitat loss are ubiquitous issues throughout the Great Lakes region. During periods of high lake level, these issues are at the forefront of management concerns within coastal communities. While decades of coastal change research have been conducted throughout the Great Lakes region and our scientific understanding of the driving processes of coastal erosion continues to grow, we generally lack the ability to accurately predict future coastal changes. This stems primarily from the challenge in predicting future lake levels, which are inherently tied to weather patterns that cannot be reliably forecasted beyond 6 months. While an understanding of the predictive limitations helps to set realistic expectations for coastal managers, it does not provide meaningful planning assistance which is requisite for working towards coastal resilience. To address this, our recent research has focused on developing simple methods for predicting the likelihood of beach recovery following high lake levels at coastal sites along the Great Lakes. The foundation of our approach is to utilize publicly available datasets, such as NOAA lake level data and the USACE Wave Information Studies hindcast wave data, and simple to collect beach and nearshore morphology data that can be generated either by research teams or community scientists. With these data, we utilize fundamental morphodynamic relationships to predict the active zone of coastal sediment transport under past and present wave and water level conditions. The likelihood of sediment transport can then be estimated for varying morphodynamics conditions (e.g., erosive, accretionary) and compared to present morphology to infer whether beach recovery is probable for a site. Case studies along the eastern coast of Lake Michigan were used to develop and evaluate this approach and revealed that moderately erosive conditions that preferentially pull sand lakeward are the most dominant morphodynamic condition. Accretionary conditions that lead to beach recovery occur less frequently (generally less than 25% of the time) and only operate on a narrow portion of the nearshore, within 100 m of the shoreline. These results mechanistically explain why shoreline armoring leads to the loss of beach area and minimizes beach recovery as armoring drives sand lakeward of the zone where accretionary waves operate. This approach provides coastal managers with a probabilistic tool for predicting future coastal change and is currently being scaled up and operationalized throughout the State of Michigan.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

NYSDEC's Great Lakes Program is leading a pilot effort to develop ecosystem-based management (EBM) plans for two watersheds of regional interest, Cattaraugus Creek and Sterling-Wolcott Creek watersheds. These watersheds were identified as regional priorities for EBM by GLAA sub basin work groups, and will be proving grounds for demonstrating a collaborative, EBM approach at the watershed scale. The Integrated Watershed Action Plans (IWAPs) are based on NOAA's Integrated Ecosystem Assessment framework for applying EBM and actions identified will directly support NY's Great Lakes Action Agenda. This framework includes identifying watershed goals, identifying and evaluating indicators of ecosystem conditions, identifying and characterizing ecosystem risks, as well as working with stakeholders to identify management strategies and projects that align with the needs of the watershed and overarching framework of the GLAA. Over 100 different existing data sets were compiled to evaluate the current status of ecosystem services as well as direct and indirect drivers of change. Across the two IWAPs, several dozen actions of watershed-scale impact were identified.

The Sterling-Wolcott watershed is centrally located on the southern shoreline of Lake Ontario and is exemplary of many ecological services and management issues encountered on Great Lakes shorelines. While this IWAP explores ecological processes and management risks along the shoreline, it also considers key linkages between the coast and interior portions of the watershed. For example, significant coastal fish and wildlife habitats are protected by coastal barrier systems however these systems require additional study as several have been breeched during 2017 and 2019 flood events and important sediment sources are being lost. Overall, wetlands comprise approximately 14% of the Sterling-Wolcott watershed, however, hydric soils cover approximately 43% of the watershed area, which suggests that there is a significant opportunity for wetland restoration and improved habitat connectivity between inland and coastal systems. Forests comprise 41% of the Sterling-Wolcott watershed and play a key role in regulating water quality and quantity flowing to the coastal systems, however forest regeneration in the watershed is poor which is concerning for long term forest resilience. Conservation planning and implementation through New York’s Agricultural Environmental Management program (Tiers 3A, 3B, 3C and 5B) tends to be below 10% on agricultural lands comprising the Sterling-Wolcott watershed, which means that there is a significant opportunity for expanded actions to protect the quality of water flowing to the coastal system. Historical agricultural expansion has been a key part of the cumulative factors (including development and lake level regulation) that have led to the expansion of invasive cattail within the coastal wetlands, which further underscores the important linkages between interior and coastal watershed processes. This presentation will explore the process of developing the Sterling-Wolcott IWAP, the ecosystem indicator and risk analyses, as well as recommended projects emerging from this effort.

Hemi-marsh wetland habitat in the Calumet region of Illinois and Indiana provides benefits to marsh birds, other wildlife, and people. Through partnerships, Audubon Great Lakes has established marshbird and vegetation monitoring at over 40 sites across the region to track marshbird species' use of wetlands that have been restored and maintained over the last several years. We estimated trends in occupancy of 12 marshbird species during 2017 - 2023 and found that, on average, occupancy has remained stable in the Calumet region. Specifically, occupancy trends for 8 species were stable, Swamp Sparrow exhibited a significant positive trend, and 3 species exhibited non-significant negative trends (American Coot, Black-crowned Night-heron, Pied-billed Grebe). Several sites across the region had consistently high average marshbird occupancy during the 7-year period, demonstrating the importance of maintaining high-quality hemi-marsh habitat to sustain breeding marshbird populations in a highly urbanized landscape. For a subset of sites, we also estimated species-habitat relationships using a variety of site-specific characteristics (e.g. percent native vegetation, wetland type, muskrat presence). These results can be used to inform best management practices for wetland restorations aimed at recovering specific marshbird species or groups of species in the Upper Midwest.

This presentation is part of the Supporting Sediment Transport organized session.

This presentation will cover some recent examples of work around the Great Lakes that prioritizes more sensitive and contextual approaches to sediment management that aim to work with coastal forms and processes to protect, enhance, and leverage the ecological and cultural values that make coastal landscapes valuable. These approaches address the tendency for coastal management decisions to “improve” toward the most efficient and transferrable possible outcomes as opposed to the most strategic and contextually sensitive. Coastal management features and initiatives should instead be understood as an extension of the cultural attitudes of a particular place in response to a set of coastal conditions or challenges specific to that place. Otherwise, coastal management, understood as a universal and transferrable collection of efficiency-motivated strategies, threatens to sacrifice the local conditions that make places special to residents and visitors.
This one-size-fits-all motivation also closely aligns with the prevalent funding mechanisms that prioritize large capital projects designed and scaled to address a worst-case modeled scenario. While often providing the protection planned, these strategies are large, expensive, and often lack monitoring or adaptation funding needed to both demonstrate efficacy or respond to unplanned conditions. By way of example, this presentation will look at a collection of projects that have attempted to prioritize more strategic and adaptive practices of coastal management, particularly in relationship to existing coastal processes such as sediment transport, and including practices understood as “natural and nature-based approaches”. Additionally, it hopes to set the stage for a larger conversation about the challenges to such approaches and how they can be addressed.
Underpinning all of this is a simple assumption that coastal landscapes are not just important things, but what makes them important is the relationships these places engender. Coastal management is not something done to protect something else, but instead is part of the important thing itself and would benefit from acknowledging its place as a cultural and ecological project – a project that has the ability to reinforce and celebrate what we all love about coastal landscapes and what makes them different from one another.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

The Obtawaing Biosphere Region is a UNESCO recognized geographic area of globally
significant ecological and cultural landscapes. Centrally located in Northern Michigan within the North American Laurentian Great Lakes Basin, it lies at the convergence of two peninsulas and three Great Lakes highlighting the importance of water-land environmental interfaces. The OBR is a non-regulatory, non-governmental consortium of organizations that provides a forum for collaboration and service to people and communities in our region. A current focus of our network is focused on the 1,700 miles of shoreline included in the region. Partners are developing tools and planning resources in order to apply best practices and local knowledge through a bioregional approach.

From 2022 to 2024 Audubon, Ducks Unlimited, and NYSDEC partnered to restore/improve hemi-marsh habitat quality at Lakeview WMA. The goal of the effort was to improve habitat for spawning fish, waterfowl and secretive marsh birds. Funding for the work came from GLRI via NOAA, through a Regional Partnership with the Great Lakes Commission.

This presentation is part of the Supporting Sediment Transport organized session.

Given what we now understand about the dynamism of Great Lakes coasts, we ask: “How could the policies governing management of these coasts empower communities to think and act in a way that maintains the ecological health of the coastal zone?” Through a comprehensive review of federal, state and local policies governing coastal management in the Great Lakes States, we have evaluated the matrix of protections across states. While this review has revealed gaps in protections, contradictory intents, inherent conflicts between the public trust and private property rights, and tensions between state and local rule, we also have discovered model policies. This presentation will briefly summarize the matrix of policies that govern shoreline protections, dredging and coastal placement, coastal wetlands and beach nourishment highlighting model policies and opportunities for their expansion as urgency grows to increase climate resiliency for people and nature.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

The Lake Superior Headwaters Sustainability Partnership (Partnership) is a collaborative of over 30 bi-state and tribal partners working together on landscape level conservation. The Partnership is centered around the St. Louis River estuary, the largest freshwater estuary in North America and tributary to Lake Superior, the most pristine of the Great Lakes. The planning region is 1,081 square miles in area, spanning the Minnesota and Wisconsin state lines and including a portion of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Reservation. Situated between the urban areas of Duluth, MN, and Superior, WI the estuary itself is home to the country’s busiest and largest bulk inland port. Boasting unique wetland and wildlife habitats, the setting is often described as a wilderness in the heart of an urban area.

The principles of sustainability, climate resiliency, and equity guide the Partnership’s approach to managing natural resources by including economic development and community health and well-being considerations. Since a large portion of the Partnership region is urbanized, considering natural resources conservation within the context of community health and economic development is imperative.

A diverse group of partners in the region have established goals and objectives for 12 Priority Concerns for the region identified through a thorough stakeholder engagement process. These landscape level goals and objectives will guide prioritization of projects undertaken by partners such that landscape scale sustainability, climate resiliency, and equity are advanced.
The Partnership is currently working to develop detailed, actionable landscape stewardship visions for large planning areas to guide conservation efforts in the Partnership region. Benefits of this process include: furthering landscape level conservation priorities established by the bi-state and Tribal Nations planning framework of the Partnership; supporting coastal climate resilience and sustainability for local communities with an intentional, inclusive approach; and broadening participation by underserved communities in the region through implementation of environmental justice principles and values and sustained meaningful community engagement.
Over time, this approach will result in implementation of community-supported habitat conservation and restoration projects that are climate resilient and aligned with a broadly accepted regional vision. Further, the approach aims to deepen and diversify involvement of communities benefiting from the work.

Since 2021, UW-Green Bay’s Cofrin Center for Biodiversity, Northeastern Wisconsin Bird Alliance, and Audubon Great Lakes formed a deep, collaborative partnership with the Oneida Nation through the successful implementation of a volunteer bird monitoring program at multiple restoration sites on the Oneida Nation Reservation located near Green Bay, Wisconsin. With the help of 100+ volunteers, we have conducted breeding grassland, marsh, and forest bird surveys and spring and fall migratory shorebird and waterfowl surveys at locations spread across five restoration sites, totaling >200 bird species. Program goals include 1) collecting an inventory of bird use on Oneida’s restoration lands, 2) providing bird-informed land management guidance to the Oneida Nation at their key restoration sites, 3) building a community of birdwatchers, 4) integrating Oneida’s beautiful culture, history, and language throughout the project with the leadership of an Oneida Tribal Elder, and 5) building bridges between the Oneida and non-tribal communities. Our collaborative project has witnessed incredible successes in terms of bird data collected; the integration of Oneida culture, history, and language into the project; a summer nature camp for Oneida youth; number of people engaged; volunteer events within the Oneida community; and land management decisions made. We will provide a brief overview of the bird monitoring program, describe how Oneida’s bird data are informing conservation and management, highlight how we are integrating Oneida knowledge into the project, and share a few “lessons learned.”

This presentation is part of the Supporting Sediment Transport organized session.

Because of a confluence of development pressures and irrepressible physical dynamics, growing numbers of Great Lakes shoreland properties and structures, built on shifting sandy shores, are at heightened risk of loss from coastal storm surge, inundation, erosion, and shoreline recession—a phenomenon akin to sea level rise on ocean coasts. In response, property owners often install (or seek to install) extensive hardened shoreline armoring structures like seawalls and revetments to arrest those erosional processes. Those structures, however, substantially impair, if not ultimately destroy, natural coastal beaches and other shoreland resources, as well as accelerate erosion of neighboring shoreland properties.
The clash of imperatives to protect shoreland properties versus conserving coastal resources signifies a wicked dilemma that Great Lakes coastal states and communities cannot avoid: armor or withdraw? More precisely, should a state or locality allow the continued armoring of Great Lakes shorelines in an attempt to fix in place shoreland properties, at great and ongoing private and public expense, and ultimately risk the loss of public trust resources? Or alternatively should it allow—and should it compel shoreland property owners to allow—natural processes to proceed, even though doing so will result in the natural conversion of privately owned shorelands into state-owned submerged bottomlands sooner than would otherwise occur? In many places, states and communities cannot hope to simultaneously protect both the beach and the beach house along naturally receding Great Lakes shorelines; they must choose which interest to prioritize first, recognizing the cost of doing so by losing the other.
Given that conundrum, this presentation will provide a survey overview of the institutional arrangements that shape federal, state, and local management of Great Lakes coastal shorelands; key planning methods and policy options that states and localities can employ to reconcile competing demands between development pressures, public and private investments, property rights, and natural systems; and legal doctrines that authorize and constrain state and local actions, including especially the public trust doctrine. The presentation will also briefly identify and consider litigation that will likely arise given growing pressures to armor and—potentially—enhanced natural shoreline protection efforts that states and localities might undertake in response, along with the potential adjudication of those claims.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

The Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Restoration Assessment (https://glcwra.wim.usgs.gov/) is an online geospatial decision support system designed to identify, assess, and prioritize areas along the U.S. coast of the Great Lakes that have the greatest potential for coastal wetland habitat restoration. In 2012, a collaborative group from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), University of Michigan, Nature Conservancy, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and other agencies initiated a geospatial analysis of western Lake Erie that characterized the restorability of the coastal area from the Detroit River (Michigan) to the Black River (Ohio). Funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and USGS supported expansion of the analysis to cover five other wetland-rich sections of the U.S. Great Lakes coasts: the Connecting River System around Lake St. Clair, Saginaw Bay (Lake Huron), Upper Lake Michigan, Green Bay (Lake Michigan), and Lake Ontario. Data from individual restoration assessments completed for each geography are available through a geonarrative and linked mappers. This analysis revealed extensive areas of potentially restorable coastal wetlands in western Lake Erie, Green Bay, and Saginaw Bay, with pockets of potentially restorable areas in the other geographies. Although a comparable analysis for the Canadian coastal area is not available yet, these products can be used in conjunction with the Great Lakes Coastal Wetland Decision Support Tool to support landscape-scale coastal wetland restoration.

The 2024 Great Lakes Piping Plover breeding season had a mix of successes including the highest number of pairs since listing in 1986, and challenges including predation and unhatched eggs. The population of this Federally Endangered species is monitored by many partners yearly throughout the Great Lakes at known populations. Audubon Great Lakes and US Fish and Wildlife Service coordinate monitoring and outreach for the population in lower Green Bay, Wisconsin that has been present since 2016 after the creation of suitable habitat due to dredged sand. Piping Plovers successfully reproduced at the site in 2024 for the ninth consecutive year, and attempted to breed at a new site roughly two miles away for the second consecutive year. We will discuss the successes and challenges of the 2024 Great Lakes Piping Plover breeding season throughout the Great Lakes, and share case studies from the lower Green Bay population, including outreach and education strategies at a site with heavy boat and beachgoer traffic vs. at a site that is closed to the public, and preview how future restoration projects could increase habitat for this species in lower Green Bay.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

The Canadian portion of the Great Lakes coastal ecosystem, spanning over 8,500 km and encompassing more than 1 million hectares, has experienced significant habitat loss since European settlement. Over 70 percent of wetlands, 80 percent of forests, and 98 percent of grasslands have been lost across the region. Conserving, protecting, and restoring the remaining habitat is important to the health of the Great Lakes, and to the people, communities, and economies that depend on them. To better understand the current extent, diversity, and condition of coastal habitats, Environment and Climate Change Canada completed a first ever Canadian Great Lakes Baseline Coastal Habitat Survey. The Survey leveraged a newly developed Great Lakes Shoreline Ecosystem classification and inventory to establish a benchmark of existing habitat and to measure and report on habitat changes over time. The survey results were then used to characterize and rank coastal ecological significance and coastal pressure, and to identify conservation needs and opportunities. This information helps resource management agencies and conservation practitioners determine where to strategically focus their efforts and resources to maintain and enhance the resilience of native species, natural systems, and processes.

Incorporating positive species interactions into ecosystem restoration is key to advancing conservation in a changing world. Identifying animals that can produce these impacts, then developing ways to harness these facilitation effects is critical to integrating this ecological theory into on the ground restoration and conservation efforts. Muskrats (Ondatra zibethicus) are a native Great Lakes ecosystem engineer that alter wetland systems by generating clearings in vegetation to build their dens. I will be presenting my preliminary data showing significantly higher animal use of areas around muskrat dens than control regions, and analyses showing that muskrat den density is an important covariate to explain bird occupancy. Together, these suggest a powerful positive species interaction where muskrat dens facilitate increased biodiversity, particularly of regionally declining marsh birds.

This panel is part of the Supporting Sediment Transport organized session.

When Great Lakes’ shorelines are able to function naturally and dynamically, they can provide multiple ecosystem benefits to the Great Lakes Basin and surrounding communities – including protection from the impacts of storms, fluctuating water levels and eroding lands – benefits that are increasingly important with changes in climate. Longshore sediment transport refers to the cumulative movement of sand, gravel, and cobble (i.e. coarse sediments) along the shoreline by the combined action of shore-parallel currents, wind, and waves. This mobilization of new sand and gravel from naturally occurring coastal erosion provides nearshore sediment-dependent protective features such as beaches, barrier bars, and dunes with the materials they need to persist and rebuild. These natural features host critical coastal habitat, provide the protected conditions that support wetlands and embayments, and provide flood protection and attenuation to surrounding properties and communities. Without these raw materials, these protective natural features and their associated wetlands disappear, impacting resiliency for coastal communities and ecosystems, as well as recreational opportunities.

Shoreline hardening is the primary method of addressing erosion on Great Lakes shorelines currently used by landowners and coastal managers. Hardening shorelines decreases the amount of sediment flowing along our shores, changes the hydrodynamics, and often increases the degree of erosion experienced by adjacent and down drift properties. Property owners who are experiencing more erosion from reduced sediment availability due to updrift shoreline hardening, find themselves in a position of either hardening their shoreline too, or losing their property investment due to increased erosion.

Join us for a moderated discussion with our session presenters, experts on the many facets of coastal management, to consider how we might come together to address this complex and challenging problem and what questions we still need to answer before we can count on resilient Great Lakes shorelines.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

A landscape conservation design (LCD) is a partner-driven approach to achieve a sustainable, resilient landscape that meets the ecological and social needs of current and future generations (lccnetwork.org). In 2023, the USFWS began drafting an LCD for the Wisconsin Lake Superior basin to be more strategic and inclusive in their conservation delivery. This would become the Headwaters to Coast Initiative, a blueprint for continued collaborative conservation. This initiative was later adopted by the Wisconsin Lake Superior Collaborative, a long-standing partnership group in the region, who are now helping to lead the effort and ensure that all partners, including the local community, and engaged. The initiative was kicked-off by gathering partners from all local organizations, governments, and agencies to discuss and develop six shared conservation priorities that serve as the foundation for the blueprint.

For this presentation, we will discuss our process for launching this initiative, the progress the initiative has made, and our plans and milestones.

Spring and fall migration are critical and highly vulnerable periods for most North American bird species. Globally, migratory birds are more likely to have declined in population than non-migratory species, and migration itself can be disproportionately more deadly than the rest of a bird’s life cycle. To reverse these declines, conserving and restoring critical migratory stopover sites is increasingly important. Among the most important and dangerous stopover regions in North America is the heavily urbanized Chicago metropolitan area, due to its intersection with a major migratory pathway and the Lake Michigan shoreline. In collaboration with local partners, we developed an interactive online mapping tool using ArcGIS Experience Builder to help identify areas with high quality habitats for migratory landbirds, threats, and opportunities for restoration within natural areas along the Illinois Coastal Region, which consists of Illinois’s coastline and river systems adjacent to Lake Michigan. We initially conducted a literature review to inform supporting information, mapping tools, and recommendations. We then created quality and restoration opportunity maps for three habitat types (woodlands, grasslands, and shrublands) by compiling and ranking a set of indicator datasets, including information from land managers in the region. We also reported different threats as individual layers for managers to identify potential localized stressors. Quality and opportunity layers and corresponding rankings were run through Zonation, a decision support software that generates spatial prioritizations, using the Additive Benefit Function (ABF) model. All protected areas in the Illinois Coastal Region were ranked based on these outputs and rankings, which resulted in a list of 8 protected areas in the region with high priority for migratory stopover conservation and management. We also developed overviews for 21 priority species based on local conservation scores, eBird abundance maps, conservation listings, and habitat needs during migration. To help guide land management in the region, we also synthesized the literature review and local expert opinion into landscape-scale, local-scale, and habitat-based recommendations. The Illinois Coastal Stopover Tool will help support the dedicated land managers working to improve habitat and support migratory bird conservation in the region.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

This project focuses on the restoration and conservation of coastal wetlands in the Great Lakes region, specifically spanning from Saginaw Bay, Michigan, to Western Lake Erie, Ohio. The importance of these wetlands lies in their multifaceted ecological functions, such as nutrient capture, carbon sequestration, erosion protection, and support for diverse species. Over time, many wetlands in these areas were drained for urbanization or agricultural purposes, compromising their natural habitat. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative has collected extensive data on these wetlands and developed decision support tools for coastal wetland managers. This Conservation Blueprint, initiated in 2016, aimed to identify conservation targets and indicators for these wetlands. Phase I, completed in 2 years, led to the development of coastal wetland indicators to track changes in wetland conditions. In 2022, Phase II was launched, focusing on refining indicators, creating maps & mapping tools, and developing an Implementation Plan. Phase III aims to ensure that the final products align with diverse stakeholder interests, fostering broad investment in shared priorities, and strategic collaboration. The specific goals for Phase III include completing a comprehensive Implementation Plan, developing a web-based platform with final maps and interactive tools, and establishing a strategy for the long-term sustainability of the Blueprint partnership. This final phase seeks to enhance coastal wetland conservation efforts and promote effective, collaborative conservation practices across the Saginaw Bay to Western Lake Erie basin.

The Laurentian Great Lakes host the largest collection of freshwater islands in the world with approximately 32,000 islands. Many of these islands hold significant ecological, economic, cultural, and historic significance and serve as an ecological refuge under a changing climate and developmental stressors. Despite the importance of these features, there are few resources to guide conservation actions for Great Lakes Islands. Therefore, the Great Lakes Coastal Assembly’s Island Workgroup is aiming to develop a series of island conservation priorities documents specific to each Great Lake to help direct conservation and restoration actions for Great Lakes islands. This nascent work is beginning with Lake Ontario and using the Islands of Life: A Biodiversity and Conservation Atlas of the Great Lakes Islands and regional expert insight to develop a review of the islands of Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River region priorities for conservation. The results of this review will help guide priority-setting by agencies and organizations, support grant applications, and bring attention to the inventory and data needs in cataloging and understanding the current state and conservation needs of Great Lakes islands.

Since the City of Buffalo’s inception, it has been impacted by Lake Erie storm surges, including the infamous 1844 event that topped a 14-foot seawall and caused extensive loss of life and property along the City’s waterfront. These surges are caused by powerful winter storms blowing along the long axis of Lake Erie and providing a low atmospheric pressure environment, which together drive water towards the east end of Lake Erie and the City of Buffalo waterfront. Climate change may increase the City of Buffalo’s exposure to storm surges by reducing ice coverage, which would otherwise suppress storm surges, and by increasing Lake Erie water levels, which reduces the freeboard available to accommodate surges when they occur.

The City of Buffalo Coastal Resiliency Study (BCRS) is a comprehensive effort to evaluate flood risks and to identify solutions to protect public and private assets. It grew out of the Imagine LaSalle initiative, a community-driven program to develop a resilient design for LaSalle Park (now called Ralph Wilson Park), which often takes the brunt of Lake Erie storm surges. The success of that program; major Lake Erie storm surges in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022; as well as concern for climate change underscored the need to broaden that community-driven framework to the City of Buffalo waterfront.

The BCRS is supported by a lake-wide hydrodynamic model which informs a high-resolution (4 m) over- bank flood model as well as a sewer backup model. This approach enables evaluation of climate change scenarios on Lake Erie surges while also enabling detailed understanding of flooding outcomes at the neighborhood scale. The BCRS models complement ongoing modeling and coastal assessments by filling a gap in the types and scale of information needed.

The modeling is supported by extensive review of historical data and literature, including Lake Erie water levels, meteorological data, the latest climate change research and projections of lake conditions, Buffalo River and Scajaquada Creek discharge data, regional and local bathymetric and topographic surveys, land-use data, infrastructure databases, proposed land development plans, and evidence of historical flooding. Ten simulation scenarios evaluated past and projected flood risk. Extreme water levels were selected based on a joint-probability analysis of measured surge and static lake levels for return periods ranging from 1- to 500-years. Four of the scenarios include climate change considerations for the 2050- and 2080-time horizons.

Information gained from modeling will be used to support an asset risk assessment, enabling stakeholder-driven selection of project priority areas and development of shoreline resiliency projects. The BCRS is supported by a GIS-based online presence, creative use of time-lapse imagery, and virtual reality tools to help stakeholders understand Lake Erie storm surges and their impacts.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

The H2Ohio Initiative is as a comprehensive, data-driven approach to reduce harmful algal blooms, enhance water quality, and improve water infrastructure in Ohio. H2Ohio functions as an integrated, collaborative water-quality partnership among state agencies, non-profit conservation organizations, the research community, and others. H2Ohio focuses specifically on incentivizing agricultural best management practices, upgrading water infrastructure and, under the auspices of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), restoring and enhancing wetland and related habitat to improve surface water quality. Since 2019, ODNR and their project partners have initiated over 180 grant-funded natural infrastructure projects, partnered on more than 190 private lands wetland and riparian restoration projects, setting in motion approximately 16,500 acres of wetland and associated habitat restoration. The ODNR prioritizes restoring wetland ecosystem function as a relatively low-cost mechanism to reduce surface water nutrient loading and eutrophication over the long term while also generating numerous beneficial add-on effects, such as the creation of habitat for endangered species and providing increased recreational opportunities. The ODNR H2Ohio Program has partnered with the Lake Erie and Aquatic Research Network’s H2Ohio Wetland Monitoring Program to measure the impact of H2Ohio restoration projects on nutrient loading. This monitoring program increasingly enables ODNR, its partners and others to make the better project selection and restoration design choices to optimize water quality benefit.

The Niagara River Greenway is a corridor of places, parks, and landscapes that celebrates and interprets the natural, cultural, and recreational values of the Niagara River. The Niagara River Greenway Ecological Standing Committee (GESC) is a non-regulatory group with representatives for the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, Tuscarora Nation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, New York Power Authority, and Niagara Relicensing Environmental Coalition. Since 2009, GESC has distributed over $16 million from the New York Power Authority’s Greenway Ecological Fund to support sixty ecological enhancement projects implemented by about twenty unique not-for-profit organizations, research institutions, and municipalities. Many of these land protection, habitat restoration, stewardship, and research projects have been relatively small in cost and scale, and may not have been considered competitive for federal grant programs. However, taken together, GESC-supported projects are contributing substantially to the resilience of the Niagara River coastal zone and improving quality of life in local communities. This presentation will explore the cumulative ecological and cultural benefits of Greenway projects, which are easy to see but difficult to quantify. It will also present the GESC as a model for peaceful, consensus-based decision making by local knowledge holders with diverse perspectives.

Lake Erie Eastern Basin is already experiencing the effects of climate change—trending warmer weather, less ice cover, more erratic weather events, and more frequent and bigger storm events. These conditions lead to increased stormwater runoff, which results in erosion, flooding, damaged infrastructure and more sewage overflow into our lakes and rivers. Toxic algae blooms are on the rise, due in part to excessive run-off of nutrient-rich stormwater, and ecosystems and habitats may be permanently altered. New York State is responding to the Climate Crisis with a series of legislative actions such as the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act and the Environmental Bond Act to name a few.

Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper is working with local government and community partners to build resiliency to the impacts of climate change, like flooding and erosion, within the WNY and Great Lakes regions. As guardians of New York’s freshwater coast, Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper works to identify opportunities to enhance community and ecosystem resilience through policy, partnerships, and nature-based solutions.

Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper is working to enhance understanding and public awareness of Western New York’s Lake Erie coastline and nearshore environments and foster stewardship in WNY’s Lake Erie watershed through our project titled, “Ecosystem Assessment towards the Prioritization of Coastal Resiliency Projects in Lake Erie’s Eastern Basin Communities”. Data gathered through this project is contributing to a greater understanding of the state of WNY’s recreational waters to protect human health, inform pollution prevention, and identify potential priority areas for coastal and climate resiliency investments.

Through this project, Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper undertook a detailed literature review of data and research focused on the Eastern Basin of Lake Erie water quality. The literature review has informed opportunities to expand and develop a more robust water quality and ecosystem monitoring program through additional water quality sampling sites, including offshore water sampling via boat. Coupled with this additional water quality data, Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper implemented a shoreline visual assessment tool (using the NYS Department of State Coastal Visual Assessment Tool as a model) to identify opportunities for increased coastal resilience efforts. Data gathered through our water quality monitoring program and visual shoreline assessments will guide our municipal engagement. Collaboratively, with municipal officials, we will identify potential priority areas for shoreline and coastal resiliency projects based on municipal priorities and identified opportunities to increase resiliency, mitigate flooding, improve water quality and create valuable habitat.

This presentation is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

Setting a goal to understand nutrient reduction in restored wetlands provides an opportunity to promote inter-institution dialogue around scientific assessment and management realities. The H2Ohio Wetland Monitoring Program mobilizes university researchers across Ohio to investigate the effectiveness of state agency-funded wetland projects. Sustained working relationships with wetland practitioners capture relevant metrics around wetland design and management decisions. The Program’s annual workshop connects >30 academic scientists and technical staff with agency and management partners for a series of structured activities and informal networking. Likewise, researchers exchange knowledge with land managers through a combination of standardized prompts and unstructured field visits, the latter of which catch insights not always detected in written form. Dialogue in each space grounds the Program’s purpose in acquiring actionable data, without sacrificing independent scientific research. The Program maintains workflows for inter-institution communication across the life cycle of a wetland project (i.e., design, construction, present use) and integrates management-related metrics into monitoring design (i.e., sampling locations near water level control structures, avoiding sensitive features upon land manager request). The first two years of the Program offer emergent themes to frame next steps in the broader space of “science-informed management”; considering how to balance expectations of urgently requested information with the scientific reality of monitoring ecological change. Ultimately, investment in wetland practitioner partnerships can strengthen understanding of wetland nutrient services in human-altered landscapes and human-managed ecosystems.

Lake Erie’s Sandusky Bay is one of the largest drowned river mouths in the Great Lakes at nearly 64 square miles, and it provides extensive ecological services as well as significant value to local identity and economics. The Bay historically supported widespread, diverse coastal wetlands supporting birds, amphibians, important fish spawning and nursery habitat, and more. Today, these wetlands and their benefits have largely been lost, and the Bay is plagued by high levels of turbidity and algal blooms.

In response, the State of Ohio Office of Coastal Management launched the Sandusky Bay Initiative (SBI), an ambitious, landscape-scale effort to restore holistic Bay functions for the benefit of both wildlife and people. This resulted in significant necessary research, fieldwork, and collaboration to understand existing conditions, impairments, and complex physical and biological Bay interactions, which informed models that enabled the team to evaluate intervention strategy effectiveness. Ultimately, The Nature Conservancy, with funding from H2Ohio, has developed a suite of innovative, synergistic projects aimed at reducing internal Bay sediment resuspension to facilitate wetland function reestablishment and maximize nutrient assimilation. A number of the projects have been funded and are underway. This presentation summarizes efforts that guided the comprehensive Bay restoration approach, as well as the innovative projects.

Under the Remedial Action Plans for the Great Lakes, the Toronto and Region AOC lists the Beneficial Use Impairment (BUI) of Loss of Fish and Wildlife Habitat and Degradation of Fish and Wildlife Populations as impaired. A Prioritization Tool is needed to guide aquatic habitat restoration along the waterfront to achieve delisting targets for Beneficial Use Impairment (BUI) 14 Loss of Fish and Wildlife Habitat and BUI 3 Degradation of Fish and Wildlife Populations and support ongoing restoration efforts post-delisting. Ecosystem restoration planning requires an integrated approach considering many components of the natural system when prioritizing where and what to restore. Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) and partners are developing a strategic approach to restoration planning, using the concept of applied science to inform meaningful implementation decisions focusing on priority areas rather than opportunism. TRCA has amassed a wealth of knowledge and data on terrestrial biodiversity, aquatic ecosystems, lake processes and hydrology. Consolidating these data sets to compare discrete areas based on different parameters and thresholds has helped direct future restoration initiatives. The Waterfront Integrated Restoration Prioritization (WIRP) framework uses existing data to reflect different restoration goals, ensuring important habitats and corridor linkages are protected, enhanced or rehabilitated. This is achieved by identifying where impairments to ecological function are located and prioritizing restoration opportunities that could contribute most to improving the existing habitat along the Toronto waterfront. This approach has been used in watershed planning and has proven successful for garnering support and new partnerships which has resulted in measurable improvements to the natural system. This presentation will outline WIRP methodology and demonstrate how it can be used as a tool to successfully achieve different natural resource planning objectives.

Confined Disposal Facilities (CDFs) are common in major Great Lakes cities to permanently house contaminated sediment. There are three CDFs in Toronto, located at the Leslie Street Spit. While one remains active, two have been decommissioned and restored to wetland habitat, representing a gain of 16.3 hectares (40.3 acres) of coastal wetland on the central Toronto waterfront and contributing toward the delisting of the Toronto and Region Area of Concern. Sediment capping was completed to physically and biologically isolate the contaminants within the CDFs and the surface was contoured to elevations to achieve marsh conditions. Drawing upon habitat designs from the Toronto Waterfront Aquatic Habitat Restoration Strategy, structural habitat features including rocky shoals, aquatic stump fields, and fish cribs, along with native emergent aquatic plants, trees and shrubs were installed to initiate the wetland habitat. Fish and water level control structures were installed to restrict invasive Common Carp into the wetlands, and to manage the wetland water levels independently of Lake Ontario. A major challenge since establishing the wetlands has been invasive plants, particularly Phragmites australis which outcompeted the native emergent aquatic vegetation community that established after construction. Toronto and Region Conservation Authority has successfully managed phragmites in the Cell 1 and Cell 2 wetlands since 2018, using an integrated approach including chemical and mechanical treatment. Through careful timing and management, a 3.33 hectare (8 acre) phragmites monoculture has been drastically reduced, and the native emergent vegetation communities have naturally regenerated. The Cell 1 and Cell 2 wetlands support a variety of wildlife communities including marsh nesting birds, turtles, and fishes, conserving biodiversity on the waterfront.

Great Lakes coastal wetlands are diverse and dynamic ecosystems that have developed to function under disturbances from both terrestrial and aquatic systems. Climate change is projected to alter these disturbances outside their historical ranges, subjecting coastal wetlands to warmer temperatures, more extreme precipitation events, greater variability in lake levels, and increased wind and wave action. These anticipated changes pose as an uncertain risk to coastal wetland habitats and are therefore challenging for natural resource managers, who must contend with limited resources for wetland management, preservation, and adaptation efforts. Using Lake Superior as a pilot, we are developing a framework to quantify the relative sensitivity of Great Lakes coastal wetland habitats to the anticipated effects of climate change. Data from the Coastal Wetlands Monitoring Program (CWMP) and state databases are used in conjunction with published literature, the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI), and expert opinion of regional and state-wide wetland professionals to assign sensitivity scores to each wetland. Here, we present the frameworks developed and share initial sensitivity rankings for vegetation, fish, and bird habitats of coastal wetlands within the Lake Superior basin of Wisconsin. By combining sensitivity and adaptive capacity scores, estimates of wetland resiliency will assist in the prioritization of coastal wetland management efforts and inform site-specific adaptation strategies, which can then be replicated on other Great Lakes systems.

This panel is part of the Landscape Conservation Planning and Prioritization Organized Session.

This presentation will highlight the extreme measures taken at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam on the Des Plaines River near Joliet, Illinois to battle the front lines of Invasive Carp to protect the Great Lakes and planning, design, and construction battles it took to win the war.

Often when we talk about coastal resilience, we are diving right into solutions that enhance or otherwise protect shorelines from the natural process. On low- and sometimes medium-energy shorelines, nature-based solutions lend themselves to positive environmental enhancements. However, on high-energy shorelines typical of Great Lake’s coastline, erosion and wave protection requires greyer infrastructure. Interrupting the natural process with rock or steel isn’t always the best solution and can be costly. We also know that climate change is resulting in periods of higher intensity storms and more extreme high and low water levels which puts valuable coastal property and infrastructure at risk.

Considering relocation for existing infrastructure and planning for higher water levels in the future are a necessary step in the planning process. It is a difficult shift to make for many communities and homeowners but can result in significant cost savings by being proactive and developing comprehensive alternatives analyses. Adapting the way projects are approached and considering all options takes a mindset shift. We will look at the planning process and execution of a Michigan State Park project where a hybrid solution was developed to save a historic building and protect prime public access to the Lake Michigan shoreline. Successful resilience requires not only innovative design, but a willingness to adapt the human emotional response as well.