2025 Midwest Fish & Wildlife Conference

AUTHORS:  Ray Valley, President and Aquatic Biologist, BioBase LLC, St. Paul MN.

ABSTRACT:  It’s well understood that aquatic plants play a critical role in lake ecosystems at multiple levels. Aquatic plants control water quality and water quality controls aquatic plants. Aquatic plants shape fish communities, structure food webs and facilitate quality sport fisheries. Invasive species disrupt the ecological balance of lakes but are strangely friend or foe depending on what audience you find yourself in. As professionals, fisheries professionals, we get this. We also see that millions are spent in the US each year to control invasive aquatic plants. Despite the stakes, aquatic plant assessment and monitoring programs have generally been underfunded. If monitoring does occur, it is typically focused on frequency of occurrence of aquatic plant species and rarely abundance (biomass or biovolume). Although a great measure of species cover and diversity, frequency of occurrence is a poor measure of habitat as perceived by fish or the total biomass of plants that contribute to a lake’s nutrient budget. More recently, methods have been developed bringing species frequency surveys together with high definition abundance surveys. Now with the advent of Artificial Intelligence and continued innovation of consumer technology, we have the capability to precisely map the abundance of individual aquatic plant species. Investment will be needed to develop, scale, or repurpose technology developed for the consumer world for aquatic and fisheries management purposes.