Recreational and tribal fisheries are popular in the upper Midwest, but there is concern that fish communities may change in the future, which may result in recreational and tribal fishers leaving the fishery. Understanding how climate change may affect walleye recruitment and how fishery managers can develop strategies for adapting to these changes is important to both recreational and tribal fishers. We will quantify the replacement cost of recreational and tribal angling in lakes in Wisconsin and identify approaches that help glacial lakes managers integrate climate adaptation into current fisheries management. This will be done by updating models that predicting walleye recruitment and presenting this information to agency and tribal biologists to develop multiple adaptation scenarios that weigh costs associated with retaining fisheries in these glacial lakes against the benefits or costs to anglers. Our approach will engage agency biologists in the glacial lakes region to identify management strategies that are available to them, determine to what extent these strategies can maintain fisheries important to their stakeholder group (e.g., walleye). The project will collectively provide various adaptation strategies coproduced with agency managers to better manage walleyes and other glacial lakes fishes under a changing climate.
