Grant: Alliance Grants

Canada hosts the largest quantity and surface area of lakes globally and relies heavily on related fisheries for the country's economic sustainability and cultural activities. Yet, freshwater lakes are threatened by anthropogenic activities, increasing the need to improve understanding of what characterizes and influences fish stocks and thereby ensure their sustainable management. Since the late 1980s, the Québec Ministère de l'Environnement, de la Lutte contre les changements climatiques, de la Faune et des Parcs (MELCCFP) has undertaken annual standard fish surveys to monitor fish habitat and populations across the province. These surveys being expensive and time-consuming, the MELCCFP is interested in examining environmental and landscape variables that require less intensive surveys but which could still enable suitable monitoring and prediction of fish production and community composition. To date, models using only abiotic factors to characterize fish habitat have however failed to satisfactorily predict fish populations. More recently, to potentially increase the predictive power of fish production models through quantifying their prey availability, fish standard surveys have been coupled with zooplankton community sampling. As the primary food source of many small-bodied and young-of-year fish species, it is expected that zooplankton taxonomic or functional composition would help improve our understanding of fish stocks at the provincial level. Through a new partnership between the MELCCFP and three Québec-based university researchers, we propose to evaluate how zooplankton community composition might influence and better predict fish communities using high-resolution compositional data from over 250 lakes across Quebec. The improved understanding of the biotic factors affecting fish production and diversity from this collaborative research could benefit fisheries agencies and policy makers, not only in Quebec, but also for Canada's fisheries management more broadly.