Likely responses to climate change of fish associations in the Laurentian Great Lakes Basin : concepts, methods and findings

How a water body’s temperature characteristics constrain organisms ecologically has been a continuing focus of interest in limnology and aquatic ecology for over a century now. A number of complementary scientific approaches are reviewed briefly. Progress in assessment of climate change is hampered by the still fragmentary and scattered scientific literature. A number of tentative generalizations are sketched. We expect that climate change of a type consistent with currently available scenarios will have severe consequences for Great Lakes fish and fisheries: in rivers that flow south, east or west and which contain isolated endemic species at the northerly edge of their ranges and which have no opportunity to migrate northwards; and where effects on the aquatic ecosystem of climate change interact synergistically and harmfully, as seems likely, with bad effects of other cultural stresses such as damming and nutrient loading.