Bringing Together Wetland Restoration Stakeholders in the Great Lakes

Status : Completed

States

Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin

Ecosystem

Lake, Wetland

Subject

Landscape conservation         Wetland restoration

The Great Lakes Assembly (Assembly) is a partnership of over 25 federal, state, provincial, and interstate agencies, tribes, NGOs, and universities working together to achieve healthy Great Lakes coasts and communities. The Assembly is leading landscape-level planning and prioritization efforts for Great Lakes coastal wetland conservation at a lake-by-lake, basin-wide scale that will help land managers and decision-makers identify where to work in the future.

The Assembly, partnering with the Great lakes Commission and agency and NGO partners in New York, hosted the third Great Lakes Coastal Symposium last fall in Rochester, New York. The Great Lakes Coastal Program contributing funding support and co-lead the Symposium planning and coordination. The theme of the Symposiumwas Great Lakes, Greater Resilience: Conserving Coasts and Sustaining Communities.  Presentations focused on conservation challenges and opportunities unique to Lake Ontario and habitat improvements at Braddock Bay Wildlife Management Area. It was well-attended by 239 participants, including managers, restoration practitioners, scientists, educators and university students.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Monroe County announced the delisting of the Rochester Embayment Area of Concern from the binational list of “Areas of Concern” (AOC) after decades of environmental cleanup and restoration. This means the AOC is no longer considered one of the Great Lakes’ most environmentally degraded areas.

The Symposium participants were joined by local partners for a field trip to Braddock Bay Wildlife Management Area that highlighted habitat restoration projects funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The participants learned about a restored barrier beach that has led to a significant increase in the shorebird use, a marsh where floods have impacted excavated ponds and caused shoreline erosion control features to fail, and a site where ground-nesting marsh birds demonstrated a preference for clustered ponds.