Cooperative Agreement with Participating Partner of the Great Lakes Northern Forests (CESU) Program.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is committed to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission and Great Lakes Council of Lake Committees (CLC), and is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU Partner to make acoustic estimations of prey fish abundances on an annual basis in all five Great Lakes. Active down-looking acoustic surveys using scientific echosounders from USGS’s vessels in lakes Michigan, Huron, Ontario, and Superior are supportive of predator stocking decisions, tracking of lake productive status, and coregonine population restoration, but these decisions are only as good as the data used supporting them. Recognizing and eliminating major sources of sampling bias in USGS’s surveys of prey fish density will lead to data that are more accurate and products that are more useful to managers