POPULATION DYNAMICS, ASSESSMENT, AND CONTROL STRATEGY EVALUATION IN THE ST. MARYS RIVER, MICHIGAN

The St. Marys River is a major producer of invasive parasitic sea lampreys (Petromyzon marinus) to Lake Huron. My dissertation seeks to inform the management process for sea lamprey through a combination of statistical and simulation modeling. In Chapter 1, I developed a spatial age-structured model and applied it to the sea lamprey population in the St. Marys River. The model included a stock-recruitment function, spatial recruitment patterns, natural mortality, chemical treatment mortality, and larval metamorphosis. Recruitment was variable, and an upstream shift in recruitment location was observed over time. During 1993–2011, transformer escapement decreased by 86%. The model successfully identified areas of high larval abundance and showed that areas of low larval density contribute significantly to the population. In Chapter 2, I evaluated six methods of estimating sea lamprey density and abundance including the currently used sampling-based estimates, generalized linear and additive models, the population model from Chapter 1, and a hybrid approach. Methods were evaluated based on accuracy in matching independent validation data. The hybrid method was identified as the best method t