Julia has always wanted to solve environmental problems with communities, and that's exactly what she gets to do as Wisconsin Sea Grant's Water Quality and Coastal Communities Outreach Specialist. Hear about how Julia has witnessed first-hand the benefits of remediation of the bay of Green Bay and the Fox River, and how she makes it her mission to help communities change their behavior toward the water.

Find Wisconsin Sea Grant in all of the following places:
Wisconsin Sea Grant: seagrant.wisc.edu
Wisconsin Water Resources Institute: wri.wisc.edu
Facebook: facebook.com/UWiscSeaGrant
Twitter: twitter.com/UWiscSeaGrant

Aquaculture is the fastest growing segment of agriculture globally, and every day, Emma uses her passion for fish and research to share aquaculture with Wisconsin's communities.

She and Greg Fischer are based at the UWSP Northern Aquaculture Demonstration Facility, where their mission is to promote public education and advance the discovery, dissemination and application of knowledge for sustainable aquaculture in a northern climate.

Find more information on UWSP NADF at aquaculture.uwsp.edu

Find Wisconsin Sea Grant in all of the following places:
Wisconsin Sea Grant: seagrant.wisc.edu
Wisconsin Water Resources Institute: wri.wisc.edu
Facebook: facebook.com/UWiscSeaGrant
Twitter: twitter.com/UWiscSeaGrant

Compared to Wisconsin's inland lakes, Lake Superior and Lake Michigan are prone to powerful, and sometimes dangerous, conditions. Adam Bechle, Wisconsin Sea Grant's coastal engineering outreach specialist, helps Wisconsin's communities and residents prepare for and respond to coastal hazards.

Find Wisconsin Sea Grant in all of the following places:
Wisconsin Sea Grant: seagrant.wisc.edu
Wisconsin Water Resources Institute: wri.wisc.edu
Facebook: facebook.com/UWiscSeaGrant
Twitter: twitter.com/UWiscSeaGrant

Hear about Wisconsin's aquatic invasive species, how they could change our way of life, and how Tim Campbell stays positive while fighting against new invasions.

Find Wisconsin Sea Grant in all of the following places:
Wisconsin Sea Grant: seagrant.wisc.edu
Wisconsin Water Resources Institute: wri.wisc.edu
Facebook: facebook.com/UWiscSeaGrant
Twitter: twitter.com/UWiscSeaGrant

Hear about why Anne Moser, Wisconsin Sea Grant's Senior Special Librarian, compares working with kids to having dessert every day.

Find more information about the Wisconsin Water Library at https://waterlibrary.aqua.wisc.edu/

Titus, Wisconsin Sea Grant's Fisheries Outreach Specialist, is passionate about using science to help Lake Michigan fisheries, small business owners and coastal community members - in other words, he's passionate about getting Friday fish fry on tables throughout Wisconsin.

Special thanks to Susie-Q Fish Market in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and to Jessica Johnsrud, Education Coordinator/Asst. Director at the Woodland Dunes Nature Center and Preserve.

To learn more about Titus' work with Wisconsin Sea Grant, visit seagrant.wisc.edu.

Diedre, Wisconsin Sea Grant's Social Science Outreach Specialist, finds great importance in working with people to solve environmental issues. In this video, Deidre talks about Milwaukee, environmental justice, and teaching kids how to be safe around the water.





days in her office crunching numbers, and out working with kids
teaching kids how to be safe around the water

A quick look at the work of NOAA's National Sea Grant College Program.

In 2016, the National Sea Grant College Program celebrates 50 years of working for America's coastal communities. This is a look at some recent regional highlights.

Julia Noordyk, Wisconsin Sea Grant's Green Bay-based coastal storms outreach specialist, has been with the organizaiton two years. But she's just begun to get her feet wet,

Lake Michigan, the world’s fifth largest lake, has undergone many changes through the generations. Its current conditions are heavily influenced by the arrival of nonnative Dreissenid mussels known as zebra and quagga mussels. These filter feeders are altering the amount of phosphorus available for phytoplankton throughout the lake, which has an effect all the way up the food chain. Research aboard the Lake Express Ferry is taking the pulse of the lake and informing management decisions.

If you build water gardens or sell plants and animals for them, please watch this video. It will help you operate an environmentally sound business.

A little holiday cheer from the many faces of Wisconsin Sea Grant. Check out Great Lakes Takes for the full annotated version: http://tmblr.co/ZIe3Sx11b9e2E.

To look at it, the round goby doesn't seem like much. A small fish the approximate size of an average pickle, it seems like the sort of creature that'd be the dominated in the aquatic universe, not the dominator.

But like an ecological David in reverse, the voracious goby has used strength of numbers to wreak serious damage on the gentle Goliath that is the Great Lakes food web. Sometimes found in groups of several hundred or more, round gobies have made short work of the key food sources that sustain the young of a lengthy list of Great Lakes sport fish: bass, walleye, and yellow perch. Round gobies also dine on sport fish eggs when the opportunity arises. These species are fighting back, feeding heavily on gobies, but goby populations are usually too large to be affected.

Worse, in what some researchers have dubbed a "classic ecological surprise," the gobies haven't limited their invasive ways to the Great Lakes: Over the past decade, they've also migrated to Wisconsin's streams and rivers, where researchers are very concerned they could have a similar devastating effect on the ecosystem.

Beginning in 2007, using funding provided by University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, UW-Madison ecologist Jake Vander Zanden and UW graduate student Matt Kornis set out to discover just what kind of impact the gobies might be having. Using nets and a portable electro-fishing system, Kornis and a team of student researchers sampled and analyzed goby populations at 150 different stream locations along Wiscosins' Lake Michigan coast.

"When we discovered round goby in some small streams in Wisconsin, it made us start to ask the question, what kind of impacts are they going to have?" stated Vander Zanden, the project's principal investigator. "How many miles of stream in Wisconsin are going to be invaded, and is this something we need to be concerned about?"

Kornis and his team spent several months sampling from a variety of stream habitats—sandy, temperate and rocky—as well as areas where goby populations were either absent, low or prevalent. Of the 75 streams Kornis's team sampled, 26 contained gobies. In more than 80 percent of those sample sites, the goby population was deemed small, with the remaining 10 percent described as "superabundant."

The most surprising finding? At most of the sites, gobies have yet to devastate the ecosystem the way they have in the Great Lakes.

"Over the last three years, at most of our sites and streams, we haven't seen the population level declines in the native species we would have expected based on what we know from the Great Lakes," said Kornis.

That doesn't mean it couldn't eventually occur. Kornis and Vander Zanden remain focused on tracking the inevitable progress of the goby. They've identified and mapped 1300 kilometers of Wisconsin streams that are at risk for goby invasion, based on habitat suitability and natural migration projections from areas where the fish have already become established. Both researchers caution that if fishermen and boaters aren't cautious about preventing the spread of invasive species like the goby, the number of invaded streams in the Lake Michigan basin could expand dramatically.

"Streams are different enough from lakes in terms of the amount of habitat and type of food available that maybe round gobies can't reach the same densities as in the Great Lakes," said Kornis. "Nonetheless, goby populations are growing in most streams. Since 2007, we've observed at least a doubling of round goby abundance at 65 percent of our sites."

Vander Zanden agrees that further vigilance is critical to goby containment and habitat preservation. "This species is on the move, their inland spread is really rapid, and there is a lot of suitable habitat for them," he said. "We're worried about them making their way into inland lakes all around the state. We expect that they will have big impacts in these systems. Anglers and boaters need to be aware and not transport these fish into new waters."

By Aaron R. Conklin

An environmental food web is an intricate, organic and delicate thing. Eliminate a strand here or introduce a new one there, and the entire structure can collapse. That's why researchers have paid such close attention to the food webs in Lake Michigan, where the appearance of several aquatic invasive species has threatened to upset the natural balance.

Harvey Bootsma and John Janssen, Wisconsin Sea Grant-funded professors at UW--Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Sciences, have their sights on the waters close to shore.

"A lot of our work has focused on what role round gobies may be playing," Bootsma said. "Up until now, the near shore has been neglected. From what we're seeing, there are some unique things going on. We've had a lot of changes in the last five years."

He's referring to a massive influx of round gobies, one of several aquatic invasive species that have set up shop in Lake Michigan's waters. In the case of the goby, the impact seems tied to strength of numbers. In short—they're legion. And they eat copiously.

"When we dive to do our research, there are at least a hundred swimming around us, watching us work," said Bootsma. "Numerically, they're clearly dominant in the nearshore zone."

Bootsma and Janssen are performing their research in conjunction with similar research teams in Indiana and Illinois, to see if conditions in one state are being replicated in others.

Existing research suggests that one of the round goby's preferred entrees is the quagga mussel, which is not the first case of one aquatic invasive species noshing on another.

However, Bootsma and Jansen's research is revealing that round gobies don't actually feed on quagga mussels until they grow larger—between two to four inches long. By conducting a chemical analysis of stable isotopes and fatty acids found in the gobies' body tissue, they're able to determine what the gobies are really eating.

"The mussels are actually a side dish," said Bootsma. "Most gobies, and especially the younger ones, are actually subsisting on other types of food."

Those other types include oligochaetes and chironomids, tiny benthic organisms that live in the Cladophora algae that have come to clog the shallow shorelines of Lake Michigan.

The question then becomes whether the round gobies' trips to the invertebrates section of the Cladophora buffet are, in effect, swiping sustenance from other nearshore fish, including yellow perch and spot-tail shiner. It's also unclear whether other Lake Michigan species like trout and salmon may be able to use the plentiful gobies as a food source to replace offshore food web components that have been affected by other invaders.

"We know that lake trout and brown trout are eating lots of round gobies," says Janssen. "But we also know that more pelagic species, like Chinooks, cohos and steelhead are not."

After spending months analyzing data collected from hundreds of samples, Bootsma and Janssen (as well as the research teams in Indiana and Illinois) are ready to head back out onto Lake Michigan and begin examining other sites.

"We're interested in learning if the patterns around Milwaukee County are typical of the whole lake," explained Bootsma.

If they are, their work could help to determine how the carrying capacity of Lake Michigan may have changed, which would affect decisions related to fish stocking and nutrient management. Stay tuned.

By Aaron R. Conklin

This video, courtesy of the Illinois Natural History Survey, shows Asian carp, primarily silver carp on the Illinois River near Havana, Illinois. The fish jump in response to the noise of the motor or where the crew is shown on a boat with nets, the charge from the electrofishing boat.

Sped up 10 times, this video emphasizes that quagga mussels are active animals--much more active than washed up shells on a beach would suggest.

Quagga mussels and zebra mussels feed by filtering tiny plant and animal plankton out of the water and extracting the nutrients they need. Material they don't digest is wrapped in mucus and expelled. This "pseudofeces" is rich in nutrients like phosphorus.

Each tiny mussel filters a quart of water each day. That vigorous activity, abetted by circulating water, has effectively filtered the entire volume of water in Lake Michigan and other Great Lakes.

In the Great Lakes, invasive quagga and zebra mussels deposit their waste in the relatively narrow bottom areas near shore, where the mussels live. This has caused two profound changes to the lakes: It has dramatically cleared the water, and it has concentrated nutrients like phosphorus near shore. As a result, phosphorus concentrations have decreased off-shore and increased near shore, and sunlight penetrates deeper into the water.

Among the many consequences to the lake's food web are a major shift of energy sources (phytoplankton) away from open waters, where they would ultimately support trout, salmon, and whitefish, and an increase in nutrients like phosphorus available to algae growing near shore.

A look at the "Exploration Station" hosted April 4 by the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute at Science Expeditions 2009.

The second part of the full Cladophora video.

The first part of the full Cladophora video.

James Fiztgerald, senior deck hand on the S/V Denis Sullivan, talks about his career in the maritime industry.

Stefan Santiago, third mate on the S/V Denis Sullivan, talks about his career in the maritime industry.

Tiffany Krihwan, captain of the S/V Denis Sullivan, talks about her career in the maritime industry.

Meet Carolyn Voter, a project assistant for Water@UW-Madison. Water@UW-Madison is an umbrella organization that connects the numerous faculty, staff, and students with water interests on the UW-Madison campus. Voter also tells us a bit about her work as a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering. For fun, she blows.

Mathews tells us how she came to be a graduate student at UW-Madison, looking into ways to pump water from the ground while avoiding the radium that it may contain.

In the name of Great Lakes science literacy, a group of educators had a firsthand experience with water-quality sampling, lake ecology, geology and geography, and weather.

Mentoring and exploration were the hallmarks of a teacher cruise aboard a replica historic schooner on Lake Michigan. More effective classroom skills were the result.

Water has been a source of inspiration for artists and scientists throughout history. Steve Carpenter of the UW-Madison Center for Limnology talks about issues related to water that inform his work and about how the disciplines of art and science might intersect.

Water has been a source of inspiration for artists and scientists throughout history. Sarah FitzSimons of the UW-Madison Art Department talks about issues related to water that inform her work and about how the disciplines of art and science might intersect.

Eight enterprising, energetic new fellows were honored at a convocation held by the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, Water Resources Institute, and the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program on Sept. 22, 2016, at the Milwaukee South Shore Yacht Club.

Lake Michigan, the world’s fifth largest lake, has undergone many changes through the generations. Its current conditions are heavily influenced by the arrival of nonnative Dreissenid mussels known as zebra and quagga mussels. These filter feeders are altering the amount of phosphorus available for phytoplankton throughout the lake, which has an effect all the way up the food chain. Research aboard the Lake Express Ferry is taking the pulse of the lake and informing management decisions.

Wisconsin Sea Grant's Titus Seilheimer spent many months counting and measuring bycatch on a trawler on Lake Michigan. using his GoPro camera, he caught some breathtaking whitefish footage.

A fishermen's guide to avoiding trap nets and gill nets in the Great Lakes -- and what to do if you get caught in a drifting net.

Here are a few clips from a video we are producing about fishing nets that break free from their anchors. These "ghost nets" continue to catch fish, interfere with boating and navigation, and are expensive and time-consuming to recover.

Fred Binkowski tells us about his work as the aquaculture specialist for the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute.

Some beautiful images convey the deadly effects of dioxin in zebra fish -- and possibly other species, like the very sensitive lake trout.

To look at it, the round goby doesn't seem like much. A small fish the approximate size of an average pickle, it seems like the sort of creature that'd be the dominated in the aquatic universe, not the dominator.

But like an ecological David in reverse, the voracious goby has used strength of numbers to wreak serious damage on the gentle Goliath that is the Great Lakes food web. Sometimes found in groups of several hundred or more, round gobies have made short work of the key food sources that sustain the young of a lengthy list of Great Lakes sport fish: bass, walleye, and yellow perch. Round gobies also dine on sport fish eggs when the opportunity arises. These species are fighting back, feeding heavily on gobies, but goby populations are usually too large to be affected.

Worse, in what some researchers have dubbed a "classic ecological surprise," the gobies haven't limited their invasive ways to the Great Lakes: Over the past decade, they've also migrated to Wisconsin's streams and rivers, where researchers are very concerned they could have a similar devastating effect on the ecosystem.

Beginning in 2007, using funding provided by University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, UW-Madison ecologist Jake Vander Zanden and UW graduate student Matt Kornis set out to discover just what kind of impact the gobies might be having. Using nets and a portable electro-fishing system, Kornis and a team of student researchers sampled and analyzed goby populations at 150 different stream locations along Wiscosins' Lake Michigan coast.

"When we discovered round goby in some small streams in Wisconsin, it made us start to ask the question, what kind of impacts are they going to have?" stated Vander Zanden, the project's principal investigator. "How many miles of stream in Wisconsin are going to be invaded, and is this something we need to be concerned about?"

Kornis and his team spent several months sampling from a variety of stream habitats—sandy, temperate and rocky—as well as areas where goby populations were either absent, low or prevalent. Of the 75 streams Kornis's team sampled, 26 contained gobies. In more than 80 percent of those sample sites, the goby population was deemed small, with the remaining 10 percent described as "superabundant."

The most surprising finding? At most of the sites, gobies have yet to devastate the ecosystem the way they have in the Great Lakes.

"Over the last three years, at most of our sites and streams, we haven't seen the population level declines in the native species we would have expected based on what we know from the Great Lakes," said Kornis.

That doesn't mean it couldn't eventually occur. Kornis and Vander Zanden remain focused on tracking the inevitable progress of the goby. They've identified and mapped 1300 kilometers of Wisconsin streams that are at risk for goby invasion, based on habitat suitability and natural migration projections from areas where the fish have already become established. Both researchers caution that if fishermen and boaters aren't cautious about preventing the spread of invasive species like the goby, the number of invaded streams in the Lake Michigan basin could expand dramatically.

"Streams are different enough from lakes in terms of the amount of habitat and type of food available that maybe round gobies can't reach the same densities as in the Great Lakes," said Kornis. "Nonetheless, goby populations are growing in most streams. Since 2007, we've observed at least a doubling of round goby abundance at 65 percent of our sites."

Vander Zanden agrees that further vigilance is critical to goby containment and habitat preservation. "This species is on the move, their inland spread is really rapid, and there is a lot of suitable habitat for them," he said. "We're worried about them making their way into inland lakes all around the state. We expect that they will have big impacts in these systems. Anglers and boaters need to be aware and not transport these fish into new waters."

By Aaron R. Conklin

An environmental food web is an intricate, organic and delicate thing. Eliminate a strand here or introduce a new one there, and the entire structure can collapse. That's why researchers have paid such close attention to the food webs in Lake Michigan, where the appearance of several aquatic invasive species has threatened to upset the natural balance.

Harvey Bootsma and John Janssen, Wisconsin Sea Grant-funded professors at UW--Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Sciences, have their sights on the waters close to shore.

"A lot of our work has focused on what role round gobies may be playing," Bootsma said. "Up until now, the near shore has been neglected. From what we're seeing, there are some unique things going on. We've had a lot of changes in the last five years."

He's referring to a massive influx of round gobies, one of several aquatic invasive species that have set up shop in Lake Michigan's waters. In the case of the goby, the impact seems tied to strength of numbers. In short—they're legion. And they eat copiously.

"When we dive to do our research, there are at least a hundred swimming around us, watching us work," said Bootsma. "Numerically, they're clearly dominant in the nearshore zone."

Bootsma and Janssen are performing their research in conjunction with similar research teams in Indiana and Illinois, to see if conditions in one state are being replicated in others.

Existing research suggests that one of the round goby's preferred entrees is the quagga mussel, which is not the first case of one aquatic invasive species noshing on another.

However, Bootsma and Jansen's research is revealing that round gobies don't actually feed on quagga mussels until they grow larger—between two to four inches long. By conducting a chemical analysis of stable isotopes and fatty acids found in the gobies' body tissue, they're able to determine what the gobies are really eating.

"The mussels are actually a side dish," said Bootsma. "Most gobies, and especially the younger ones, are actually subsisting on other types of food."

Those other types include oligochaetes and chironomids, tiny benthic organisms that live in the Cladophora algae that have come to clog the shallow shorelines of Lake Michigan.

The question then becomes whether the round gobies' trips to the invertebrates section of the Cladophora buffet are, in effect, swiping sustenance from other nearshore fish, including yellow perch and spot-tail shiner. It's also unclear whether other Lake Michigan species like trout and salmon may be able to use the plentiful gobies as a food source to replace offshore food web components that have been affected by other invaders.

"We know that lake trout and brown trout are eating lots of round gobies," says Janssen. "But we also know that more pelagic species, like Chinooks, cohos and steelhead are not."

After spending months analyzing data collected from hundreds of samples, Bootsma and Janssen (as well as the research teams in Indiana and Illinois) are ready to head back out onto Lake Michigan and begin examining other sites.

"We're interested in learning if the patterns around Milwaukee County are typical of the whole lake," explained Bootsma.

If they are, their work could help to determine how the carrying capacity of Lake Michigan may have changed, which would affect decisions related to fish stocking and nutrient management. Stay tuned.

By Aaron R. Conklin

This video, courtesy of the Illinois Natural History Survey, shows Asian carp, primarily silver carp on the Illinois River near Havana, Illinois. The fish jump in response to the noise of the motor or where the crew is shown on a boat with nets, the charge from the electrofishing boat.

Sturgeon spearing has its roots in the customs of many of the Native Americans who lived in the Great Lakes region long before Europeans arrived in North America. Some of the earliest French explorers to Wisconsin wrote about their encounters with the Menominee tribe, noting their skill at spearing sturgeon through the ice. Just as they did with many Native American customs and habits, French explorers and traders adopted the ice spearing technique as a tried-and-true way to secure fresh fish during the long winters.

By the early 1900s, unregulated fishing for sturgeon—by spear, net, and setlines—had taken its toll on the population, and harvesting the fish in any manner was outlawed throughout Wisconsin in 1915. However, as the Great Depression took hold of the nation, sportsmen in Wisconsin began lobbying to regain access to the giant fish. The legislature listened, and in June 1931 the law passed to reopen sturgeon spearing on Lake Winnebago. And although specific rules and regulations have changed over the years, there has been an annual spearing season ever since.

For more information about the Lake Winnebago sturgeon spearing season, see http://dnr.wi.gov/fish/sturgeon/lakewinnebago

For more information about the book People of the Sturgeon: Wisconsins Love Affair with an Ancient Fish, a book sponsored by the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, see www.winnebagosturgeon.org

This video was shot in 2008.

This video is a training resource for winter maintenance professionals. Here, learn the basics of chloride pollution, manual snow removal, de-icers, and correct salt application.

This video is brought to you by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, Wisconsin Salt Wise, Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District, UW-Wisconsin Madison, and University of Wisconsin Water Resources Institute.

Julia has always wanted to solve environmental problems with communities, and that's exactly what she gets to do as Wisconsin Sea Grant's Water Quality and Coastal Communities Outreach Specialist. Hear about how Julia has witnessed first-hand the benefits of remediation of the bay of Green Bay and the Fox River, and how she makes it her mission to help communities change their behavior toward the water.

Find Wisconsin Sea Grant in all of the following places:
Wisconsin Sea Grant: seagrant.wisc.edu
Wisconsin Water Resources Institute: wri.wisc.edu
Facebook: facebook.com/UWiscSeaGrant
Twitter: twitter.com/UWiscSeaGrant

Lake Michigan, the world’s fifth largest lake, has undergone many changes through the generations. Its current conditions are heavily influenced by the arrival of nonnative Dreissenid mussels known as zebra and quagga mussels. These filter feeders are altering the amount of phosphorus available for phytoplankton throughout the lake, which has an effect all the way up the food chain. Research aboard the Lake Express Ferry is taking the pulse of the lake and informing management decisions.

A screencast to accompany the final training modules for the Virtual Beach software. This video walks the viewer through the "Making Nowcast Predictions" module, available at virtualbeach.org.

A screencast to accompany the fifth of six training modules for the Virtual Beach software. This video walks the viewer through the "Building & Evaluating MLR Models" module, available at virtualbeach.org.

A screencast to accompany the fourth of six training modules for the Virtual Beach software. This video walks the viewer through the "Data Prep - MLR" module, available at virtualbeach.org.

A screencast to accompany the third of six training modules for the Virtual Beach software. This video walks the viewer through the "Building & Evaluating Anytime GBM Models" module, available at virtualbeach.org.

A screencast to accompany the second of six training modules for the Virtual Beach software. This video walks the viewer through the "Data Preparation-GBM" module, available at virtualbeach.org.

A screencast to accompany the first of six training modules for the Virtual Beach software. This video walks the viewer through the "Beach Orientation" module, available at virtualbeach.org.

The Great Lakes, a vital asset to 35 million residents, have a legacy of pollution due to our nation's industrial past. The Great Lakes Legacy Act revitalizes rivers, lakes, and harbors, known as Areas of Concern, helping to restore lost benefits. This video outlines the Great Lakes Legacy Act and highlights benefits it brings to communities.

Produced by Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and Wisconsin Sea Grant with funding support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, under Agreement No. DW13923292. Additional thanks to Keith McCoy, Mark Loomis, Legacy Act partners, and all interviewees.