AUTHORS: Travis Hartman, Ohio DNR-Division of Wildlife
ABSTRACT: Lake Erie’s walleye population has a long history of resiliency while providing sustainable harvest for sport and commercial fisheries. Walleye have endured system-wide habitat alterations, impactful contaminants, invasive species, and greatly improved fisheries efficiency over the past 125 years. Management agencies acknowledged the need for lake-wide collaboration and began quota management in the 1970s through the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s facilitation of the Lake Erie Committee. During 50 years of quota management the process has evolved to include a published management plan that was informed by stakeholder input and utilizes long-term datasets to annually run a population model that is paired with harvest control rules which allows the Lake Erie Committee to deliberate and set safe harvest levels. As one of the five Lake Erie Committee agencies Ohio provides technical representation on the Walleye Task Group, provides both fishery data and fishery-independent survey data for the modeling process, and sets fisheries regulations that are responsive to annual safe harvest levels. Lake Erie has been widely recognized as the “Walleye Capital of the World” and Ohio’s sport fishery has harvested from 2.0 to 2.6 million walleye annually since 2019. While management challenges and environmental variability have been a constant even during the recent increases in walleye abundance, the long-term outlook for Lake Erie walleye is exceptional.
