Fisheries Working Group

Conserve stronghold populations of vulnerable cold and coolwater fish in the most resilient locations by increasing protections of critical streams and watersheds for native fish and restoring habitat (for example, making stream channels narrow and deep, reducing streambank erosion, reconnecting streams to floodplains and wetlands, planting trees to shade streams, promoting land covers and lakeshore practices that improve water quality).

• Explore: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s Brook Trout Reserves program

Strategically rehabilitate heavily impacted populations through a combination of place-based techniques. This strategy requires identifying high-priority lakes with cool or coldwater fish, developing place-based rehabilitation plans with local partners, and carrying out those actions that may include harvest limitation, stocking, habitat remediation, food web manipulations, and best management practices for water quality and nearshore habitat.

• Explore: Healing Ogaa (Walleye Sander vitreus) Waters: Lessons and Future Directions for Inland Fisheries Rehabilitation (pdf)

Ensure areas of refuge are accessible to cool and coldwater species by removing barriers to fish movements like dams and perched culverts that disconnect streams from cold headwaters, and reducing nutrient runoff that can make the deep, coldwater layer of lakes inhospitable.

• Explore: Reconnecting Habitat and Cisco Refuge Project in Minnesota

Strategically stock species, size classes, and genetic strains that are most likely to meet recreational and cultural demands. Stocking should be viewed as one tool to use where necessary, but since climate change creates a habitat problem that stocking does not address, stocking should not be viewed as a silver bullet.

Prevent expansion of invasive species via outreach and education, best management practices, and expanded invasive species monitoring.

• Explore: Aquatic Invasive Species Prevention

Protect commercially and recreationally important Great Lakes fisheries, such as yellow perch and whitefish, through harvest control rules and protection of spawning and nursery habitats.

In some places, embrace the expansion and growth of warmwater fish populations like largemouth bass, bluegill, and crappie, especially where resistance of coolwater fish declines is unlikely to be successful.

Help enhance naturally expanding populations of warmwater species by enacting regulations and pursuing habitat restoration projects that are likely to produce desirable outcomes, for instance by altering panfish bag limits to produce desired size structures.

• Explore: Experimental regulations to increase panfish size in Wisconsin (pdf)

If habitat cannot support natural reproduction, reprioritize management toward put-and-take fisheries in places where it is critical to continue the fishery and where alternative species are not desired or well-suited for the habitat.

Direct change toward new fishery types. While difficult, this strategy can expand fishing opportunities and support fishing culture in Wisconsin. For instance, could warmer-tolerant hybrid saugeye populations be stocked in some places now unsuitable for walleye? Could certain genetic strains be better adapted to current and future conditions? Is there a social desire for these new fisheries?