Lake Champlain fisheries and ecosystem in the context of the Laurentian Great Lakes: past research, current management issues, and future research priorities

Ellen Marsden, Thais A. Bernos, Jason D Stockwell

Lake Champlain is a large lake bordered by New York, Vermont, and Quebec. This bi-national, multi-jurisdictional lake shares many management issues and challenges with the much larger bi-national Laurentian Great Lakes, including a history of commercial fisheries, species declines and extirpations, sport fisheries supported by stocking, and invasion of non-native species. The bathymetric complexity of Lake Champlain, which is fragmented into five trophically different basins, makes it an excellent ‘test site’ for shared research with larger systems of varying trophic states. The size of Lake Champlain makes it very tractable for whole-lake research, including lakewide tracking of fishes with acoustic telemetry. Many research projects have borrowed from Great Lakes expertise, and have likewise contributed to Great Lakes research and management. Valuable contrasts include rapid restoration of a self-sustaining lake trout population in Lake Champlain despite high sea lamprey wounding and an alewife invasion in 2003; decline of naturally-reproducing walleye stocks; a healthy whitefish population and apparent collapse of cisco. Lake Champlain has not yet been invaded by quagga mussels or round goby, so a recently developed whole-lake food web model will be highly informative to predict their potential effects prior to invasion and then test these hypotheses if and when invasions occur. Most commercial fisheries closed in the early 1900s, but the sale of recreationally-angled fishes is legal though undocumented and un-managed. We provide an overview of the biological communities, food webs, management structure, and management history in Lake Champlain, compare and contrast the lake with the Great Lakes, and highlight research priorities to provide a foundation for new research and improve science-based management of fishes in Lake Champlain.