The Challenges of Integrating Great Lakes Fisheries and Environmental Data to Enable an Ecosystem Approach to Data Management

Fisheries management of the Laurentian Great Lakes is shared by Canada and the US, eight states, the province of Ontario, and several Native American tribes. Under the Great Lakes Fishery Commission Joint Strategic Plan for Management (JSP), adopted in 1981, fisheries management is coordinated through the working committees on each lake. One of the key elements of the JSP is the sharing of information between the managing agencies.  However, each agency collects and stores data according to their internal guidelines.  Therefore, data is not stored in a common format, collected over the same spatial or temporal scales, or built with the same database software. This situation complicates data sharing and introduces problems of integrity, comparability, and quality assurance.  We describe the challenges of integrating fisheries and environmental data including spatial and temporal scales, aggregation versus summarization, collection protocols and data validation, and acceptance by the fisheries management community.  We examine the value of a centralized, web-based system of data acquisition, database management, decision support modeling and visualization for aiding fisheries managers. We also explore visualization tools as important ways of analyzing, viewing, and sharing data, and present new tools under development.