Manny, Bruce, Jennifer Read, Douglas Denison, Robert Reider, Gregory Kennedy, Nathan Caswell, James Boase, and Jerry McClain. 2005. Creation of lake sturgeon spawning habitat in the Detroit River. Pages 98-100 in Eedy, R., J. Hartig, C. Bristol, M. Coulter, T. Mabee, and J. Ciborowski, eds. State of the Strait: Monitoring for Sound Management. Occasional Publication No. 4. Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario. 135 pp.
Contribution # 1315 (OP)

The State of the Strait Conference is held every two years to bring together government managers, researchers, environmental and conservation organizations, students and concerned citizens from Canada and the U.S. to assess ecosystem status and provide advice to improve research, monitoring, and management programs for the Detroit River and western Lake Erie. The theme of the 2004 conference was “Monitoring for Sound Management.”

Clearly, monitoring is essential for effective and defensible management. Management agencies will not know what actions to take to restore or protect the health of the river and lake without a fundamental understanding of their condition. Monitoring is given a much lower priority today than in the 1970s and 1980s. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to upgrade sewage treatment plants and clean up contaminated sediments. Tens of thousands of dollars are spent each year to measure the quality of the Detroit River’s and western Lake Erie’s water, sediments, and biota. However, managers still don’t really understand whether the ecosystem is improving or not. Stakeholders frequently ask for indicator data to evaluate the effectiveness of programs. Indeed, a 2004 report, “Flying Blind: Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment in the Great Lakes States,” concluded that in the 30 years following the signing of the U.S. Clean Water Act there is simply no way to state with confidence whether the waters of the Great Lakes are safe for public use (Environmental Integrity Project 2004).

To be able to measure progress, future monitoring programs must evaluate ecological conditions against quantitative ecosystem targets. Evaluating progress toward restoring impaired beneficial uses should be a priority. Management actions taken on the Detroit River and western Lake Erie should be treated as experiments: monitoring documents conditions prior to intervention, guides predictions/hypotheses, and measures the outcomes and effectiveness of actions taken.