Understanding Fish Community Dynamics and Environmental Associations in the Great Lakes of the Northwest Territories, Canada

An ecosystem-based fisheries management framework for decision making requires the development of ecological indicators that allow anthropogenic impacts on fish and fisheries to be detected and managed against the background of natural variation. The northern Great Lakes (Bear and Slave) are part of one of the world’s largest river systems, the Mackenzie, located in the Northwest Territories, and their environmental productivity is largely influenced by arctic climate variability, and commercial, aboriginal and recreational fisheries. Since 2012, we have applied a random depth stratified design to conduct standardized ecosystem level fisheries assessment studies in these northern Great Lakes with the goal of determining linkages between the environment, harvest and fish production. Due to the large sizes of these lakes, the ecosystem level monitoring of harvested and non-harvested fish, zooplankton, benthos, primary producers and water quality parameters is being conducted on a rotational basis in the various fisheries management areas within each lake. We present our study design along with preliminary results on fish community patterns of species composition, and spatial patterns of distribution and abundance of fish, zooplankton and benthos as well as their association with aquatic environmental variables.