by Adam Hinterthuer
In the fall of 2021, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced the creation of the ninth, and final, Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC). The newly formed center, dubbed Midwest CASC, launched a collaboration among universities and other partners across eight Midwestern states.
Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, extolled the virtues of the new Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, saying that it “better positions us to mitigate climate impacts while focusing needed attention to Tribal and state resources that are particularly vulnerable to climate change.”
The goal, says Center for Limnology (CFL) director Jake Vander Zanden was to foster “science aimed to inform this fundamental challenge we have, which is adapting to climate change. There is a need for research in that area and it needs to be translated rapidly into how we manage ecosystems.”
Now, three years into this partnership, Midwest CASC is producing results. Member organizations have authored dozens of scientific publications on everything from conservation efforts for species like walleye, Monarch butterflies and Blanding’s turtles to climate impacts on lake surface temperatures, grassland management and forest nurseries. And, to fully fulfill their mission, Midwest CASC partners routinely conduct trainings on best management practices and participate in other events, like a recent knowledge exchange workshop with the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Former CFL graduate student Joe Mrnak is now a research scientist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) where he still participates in Midwest CASC research. As a graduate student, Mrnak was involved in a project to try to help cisco, a native fish species, reestablish their “niche” in warming lake habitats. By focusing on variables that fisheries managers could control, like removing invasive rainbow smelt that were negatively impacting cisco, Mrnak and his team hoped to build cisco resilience to bigger climate impacts they couldn’t control.
Mrnak hopes to help shift fisheries management paradigms from a “single species” focus to one that considered species interactions, ecosystem changes and other variables to produce a more holistic form of resource management. In other words, as he said in Trout Lake Station’s 2022 newsletter, the goal was to “find a better way to manage a fishery.”
Mrnak’s research is just one example of Midwest CASC helping to change the way we understand and manage our natural resources, says Midwest CASC communications director, Jess Del Fiacco.
Del Fiacco highlights a number of CFL-connected projects, like CFL associate professor Hilary Dugan’s work on the appearance of more frequent bluegreen algae blooms in Lake Superior, and the “Bright Spots” project that is co-led by associate professor Olaf Jensen, CFL research scientist Zach Feiner, and graduate student Quinn Smith, that strives to identify climate “refuges” for struggling walleye populations.
“We’re a relatively new center,” Del Fiacco says, “so in general, I’m excited to watch our network grow in the coming years and to see our research impact management practices.” Already, she says, examples of the work the CFL is doing as a Midwest CASC partner shows that the center is well on its way to fulfilling its mission to “deliver science to help fish, water, wildlife, land, and people adapt to a changing climate.”