University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
IN-4: Innovation 4

Starting about 10 years ago and continuing today, UW - Green Bay faculty and students have been working on an innovative approach for monitoring the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem. A massive and complex ecosystem such as the Great Lakes is difficult to evaluate in totality, so the developing framework of utilizing biotic indicators in a "probalistic framework to derive an index that best 'fits' an observed assemblage of species, based on preliminary information about species' responses to human environmental disturbance" allows for increasing accuracy in resource management practices. Graduate students have benefited from this research with multiple publications and theses projects. In addition, this method of monitoring ecosystem health is now being applied to other types of environments such forests. New funding to work in collaboration with other U.S. and Canadaian institutions has been received from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to develop a permanent monitoring program for coastal wetlands of the Great Lakes. The work provides a basis to inform policy-makers at local, regional and even international levels about sustainable management of natural resources.