Disclaimer: This is an automated transcript, we apologize for any errors. If you notice any problems, please email the show at teachmeaboutthegreatlakes@gmail.com. Thank you.

Stuart Carlton 0:00
teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes John, welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes a twice monthly podcast in which I, a Great Lakes novice, ask people who are smarter and harder working than I am there it is all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton and I know a lot about doing introductions to podcasts. But I don't know a lot about the Great Lakes and so we're here to learn I'm joined to I cannot even believe this is happening. This is a lovely day people some days are special but some days are more special than others. I'm joined today by the man the myth the legend is hope charters, hope how are you?

Hope Charters 0:39
I am a woman not a man? Yes, I am here

Stuart Carlton 0:42
it doesn't flow as well. You're right. The woman the myth, the legend, alternators. What's up hope?

Hope Charters 0:49
I'm doing well. I'm excited to be back. It's been a long time.

Stuart Carlton 0:52
I think this is the first time you've been on a show with me this year. You're on the freedom seekers. One the great episode we did on the Underground Railroad curriculum, which I will link to in the show notes but I don't think we have we have podcast to Li hung out in a bit.

Hope Charters 1:05
Yeah, it's a pandemic has been pretty rough. I haven't felt like being on a podcast. Not gonna lie.

Stuart Carlton 1:12
Neither have I. Here I am. Every other week. No, this is great. Actually, this has been the the proverbial port in a storm. This has been the cherry on the top of the bleep Sunday that is 2020. And you just seek out the cheering? Anyway, really not much has changed since you left except for one important thing. And that thing is we're preparing for the Lakies. I don't know. Do you know about the lakies?

Hope Charters 1:36
No, please tell me about blinkies. I feel like I've heard about them. But I don't know exactly what you're planning.

Stuart Carlton 1:40
Well, I don't know that either. I just know we're having lakeys. Alright, this is the thing is we're having lakies and what the lakies are, they are our worker, they are probably not the least prestigious, Great Lakes related award show that there is. And so this is going to be probably our last show of the year unless like the book club episode, we just keep delaying it for various reasons, in which case the lake is LePen. Who knows. But no, these are happening in December, this is gonna be our year wrap up. This is the first annual like he's, we're gonna watch people on air. But what we need is we need you listen to right now pause this while don't pause it yet, because you haven't heard what to do. After I tell you what to do, then you're gonna pause it and go to bitly.com/lakies 21 That's l- a- k- i- e- s two, one. And you need to nominate some stuff for the lakies. We have a lot of categories, we have the science communication of the year, we like the outreach program near the Great Lakes news of the year, the Great Lakes Science podcast of the year nanti. Throughout the Great Lakes edition, the general podcast is that I think podcasts of your might be there's a ton of categories, Great Lakes animal of the year and the one I want to talk about today, which is great lakes, non animal of the year. So we have a nominee for Great Lakes non animal of the year. And that nominee is the oyster mushroom. So nominee Have you had an oyster mushroom? Hope?

Hope Charters 2:56
I have not. Also though when you're sending people to URLs, you should probably get the URL, right? It's not bitly.com it's bit.ly/yeah.

Stuart Carlton 3:07
Another thing is when you're correcting your supervisor, you should make sure that your correction is accurate.

Hope Charters 3:12
Did you actually get a bitly.com That's weird.

Stuart Carlton 3:15
Just go and paste that into your browser right now. Right now. I'm gonna try. Alright, hold on. Do to do. All right, but

this is what I've missed having you on. A train wreck now it's good. It's all good stuff. Or you can go to bit.ly/like He's 21 That's fine. So do you know about oyster mushrooms? Hope?

Hope Charters 3:44
No, I do not know about these mushrooms. Why are they oyster?

Stuart Carlton 3:47
Mushrooms? Oh, they're mushrooms? That's a good question. Right? There would be mushroom oysters otherwise, either way.

Hope Charters 3:53
Because I like him neither oysters and nor mushrooms. I'm not gonna lie. Oh,

Stuart Carlton 3:57
the nominee. Well, I'm going to talk about the nomination says here oyster mushrooms which are not aquatic as we both know, obviously. But they're native to the region. And this is a direct quote from the nomination. Totally delicious. Totally delicious. And then on top of that, this is actually really interesting. They have a lot of promise in terms of the bio remediation of pollutants. So that's cool. You can use mushrooms and it's called micro remediation. I'll put some links to it Mike Mike of remediation, I can't anyway, you can use mushrooms to try to pull some pollutants out of the ground. So that is really cool. And that is why they were nominated for a lakie is because you know they're they're your pasty. They're local and you can use them to remediate pollutants and so you know that's an important thing right?

Hope Charters 4:36
So it sounds to me like you use mushrooms to pull pollutants out of the ground but then you're also saying that you can eat them so why would you want to eat the pollutants?

Stuart Carlton 4:43
No, you don't I don't know a ton about mushroom, bioremediation but no you don't eat those. So you got a whole separate one don't look up where mushrooms are grown though just don't do that like the white button mushrooms. And but if you don't like them, it'll be fine. Anyway and then some species I also found out some species even cool When the dark which I did not know, so I'm gonna I'm not gonna lie animal of the year and non animal the are some of our most contentious categories,

Hope Charters 5:07
right? So what's what's up and then in the ranks for animals

Stuart Carlton 5:11
to tune in for ladies to find out I'm not going to tell you that. But that's a great question hope and I'm glad you asked that. And the answer is, is, you know the oyster mushrooms are a great non animal but will they win the Leakey to an end to find out. And if you're not a big oyster mushroom fan, like you know some of the people on this very episode, then nominate your own Leakey go to bitly.com/like, he's 20 want to do it, just do it, or bit.ly/lakeith 21 We don't really care, we believe in URL diversity. So do that. Pretty excited about earlier today. Her name is Dr. Kelly Robinson. She's an assistant professor at the quantitative fishery center in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State. And she's done a lot of work on decision analysis or structured decision making. And I kind of know what that is. And I kind of know that it's important. But you know, I also know that we need to learn more about it, or at least I do. So there's a lot for me to learn. So let's go ahead and bring on Kelly.

And so we'll just talk about your work kind of generally, and what goes into it and what we've learned from it, and just you know, anything else I just found out you did a submersibles. We'll probably talk about that, too. Because that I don't know, from the outside. I don't know if you'll ever do anything cooler than that again in your career. Oh,

Dr. Kelly Robinson 6:37
no, no, I definitely want it peaked in grad school for sure.

Stuart Carlton 6:43
Yeah, I hear you there. Okay, good. So yeah. Tell me about the summer. So you so you're, you're you're like a marine scientist, right in grad school? And how does that end up with you in a submersible because I went to graduate school and studied some marine stuff. But I did not end up in a submersible. So I was doing it wrong. What did I do wrong? I guess,

Dr. Kelly Robinson 7:01
I don't know. I think I really lucked out with the my advisor that I was working with. So I was in grad school at the College of Charleston in the marine biology program, getting my masters. And my study organism was the barrel fish, which is a fish that's found in deep waters around the area called the Charleston bump, which is about 100 miles offshore from South Carolina. And we really don't didn't know much about it, we would start catching them when they're, you know, I don't know, five years old or older. So there's a lot of hypotheses about you know, what's going on with the younger age classes of these fish. I mean, to cut to the chase, we still don't really know I didn't learn that from the submersible. But my advisor was, George said, Barry, who was a scientist at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, and he had been doing some work with the NOAA ocean exploration program. And this is it was a really cool program. I think it's still ongoing, certainly all of this stuff is still online for it, where it's kind of allows marine scientists to go out and do research, exploring the ocean, but we do it in such a way that it can be useful for like K 12, teachers to teach about different aspects of the ocean, or fish or whatever we're working on. So the one that we were studying, or working on what's called the estuary to the abyss. So we did transects, from kind of shallower waters all the way to the area around the Charleston bump that George had been studying for a number of years looking at how that affects fish that are important for fisheries, like some of these lesser known things like barrel fish, but also other more important fishes that we tend to catch. So as part of that, we did two submersible dives a day I got to do one of those. I think it was about a 10 day cruise. Myself and some other grad students and other folks that worked at South Carolina DNR. We did submersible dies, we did other sorts of sampling, the all of which I can't remember now, because that was quite a long time ago. And we wrote up little blurbs about the stuff we were doing to post on that ocean exploration website so that teachers could use that for for teaching.

Hope Charters 9:09
For those of us who maybe don't know what a submersible is, can you explain whether Yeah,

Dr. Kelly Robinson 9:14
I can back up. So as Yeah, the submersible, the one that we worked we were on was the Johnson ceiling, which is housed on the RV sewer Johnson, which is, if you've ever seen a picture of like a it looks like a submarine, but it's kind of giant glass bubble on the front of it. It's used for a lot of different types of underwater research, obviously. And you can see in the front of it, there's someone who's driving it in this bubble, and there's a scientist sitting next to them, but little did you know, there's also two people that sit in the back of this thing with a porthole there's the size of about a dinner plate. That's where I was

Stuart Carlton 9:49
like, I'm looking at this thing now. No, this is That's how big Oh, I'm gonna put this link in the show notes. I'll paste it in the little chat thing. Okay. Yeah, we're in that.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 9:56
Yeah, that was in the back of it. So Um, it

Stuart Carlton 10:00
hasn't been a one thing.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 10:03
I can look at a picture with you. But yeah, it's. So the front of it Yeah, is where the scientists and the driver says, and if you were to look at the back of it, you would see that there's room for two more people. There's another person who helps with running the submersible. And there's another scientist back there. Yeah, so you're looking at a porthole, but I mean, it's like the coolest porthole that you've ever done. So we went down 1000 meters or 3000 feet, to you know, basically kind of see what was going on on the ocean floor. And if I can try to find some links, so what we were doing too, so it gives it to you. But yeah, it's really neat, you know, we turn off the all the lights, so you can see the bioluminescence on the way down. And then we got to see some, some Barix species of fish and lots of different kinds of cool invertebrates and things that you've never seen before. You can also use that submersible to take samples of things on the ocean floor. So we have brought in some really cool sea creatures to document and archive and then use for different projects. So just a really neat experience. I mean, you know, I was in the back. So it wasn't quite as amazing as that 360 degree bubble, but it's still this, as you said at the beginning, the coolest thing I'll ever get to do and scientists.

Stuart Carlton 11:19
Yeah, on it. They literally were William Shatner is about to get launched into space. It's a good reminder that we have so much to do kind of at home, too. In terms of exploration. This is a sure yeah, this is cool.

Hope Charters 11:30
You do not want to go in a submersible. I'm looking at a picture of it right now. You do not want to go if you have any kind of claustrophobia.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 11:37
No, no, you don't. I, I was concerned because I do have a tendency to get motion sickness. And you know, I've heard stories, when you're trying to retrieve the thing, if the water is too rough, you kind of basically have to bop around in the water until they can calms down so they can get you back out of the water. So they're very, you know, cautious about watching the thing if if they expect that the weather is going to change at all, but and you kind of have to didn't drink any water for a while beforehand. So

Hope Charters 12:04
I hope you did not puke on the other three people that were

Dr. Kelly Robinson 12:06
saying no, I did not. There was conservative, I was totally fine. But I think it was probably about three or four hours that it took to get in and get down there and come back up. So

Stuart Carlton 12:18
So was it a barometric pressure thing to think about it? Like you have to come up slowly like divers do? Or can you just shoot up in your good?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 12:25
I want to say Yeah, probably. But honestly, it's been a while. So I can't remember exactly how long it took us to come back up. It wasn't you know, you we weren't shooting up from the bottom for sure. But

Stuart Carlton 12:34
yeah. So let's, let's take it back a little bit, though. But as soon as I saw submersible, like, well, we got to start there. So how did you get into like fish stuff? Like, what was the attraction to that to you, you know, coming up? Yeah.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 12:49
So I grew up in coastal Virginia, around the Virginia Beach area and city called Chesapeake. So, you know, just kind of grew up around the ocean and really loved going to the local marine science museum. Even when I started grad school, though, I wasn't quite sure whether it was going to be fisheries or some other aspect of, of marine biology that I was interested in. But I lucked out again, you know, found a good project working on this fish, the barrel fish. And it kind of, you know, hooked me in terms of working on on fisheries, and then thinking about how we can better manage some of these fisheries. So the research I was doing, like I mentioned, was just trying to understand kind of how how old this fish gets, we found that it lives up to about 85 years and has a really high agent maturity. So we knew that it's going to it's difficult to manage because it could be over fished pretty easily. And that kind of got me interested in thinking about how we manage fish in general.

Stuart Carlton 13:45
So the main is our connection was kind of there for you right away.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 13:48
Yeah, working directly with Department of Natural Resources. There was a kind of management interest for a lot of the research that's done there.

Stuart Carlton 13:57
Yeah, it's kind of wasn't me. So like I started working on the project with So Kelly and I, Shara Shara an advisor, my master's advisor was her PhD advisors, right. Yeah. Yeah. And so we're working on a project with a imperiled species of soccer. And yeah, we worked with South Carolina DNR also, actually, now that I think about it, and some other people that management was built right in because to me, it's that's the a lot of the I guess the the so what, in addition to the walk, right, yeah, exactly. And then, so then you went to UGA what and you sort of is that when you moved into no idea? When did you move into a freshwater side? Was that at UGA? Or was that later?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 14:35
That was later? So UGA did move kind of inland a little bit. I was working in estuarine systems there. So yeah, that was with Cecil Jennings, who is recently retired but was the head of a Georgia Co Op unit there. And that project was looking at impounded wetlands that are managed for waterfowl and shorebirds. So these are wetlands that actually had been impounded since I want to say maybe this 16 or 1700s for rice cultivation, and then they kind of they use the same technology they had back then, which obviously wasn't great technology. But it was this idea of moving, having these trunks and move water in and out based on the title cycles, and they couldn't move the water in and out to grow food for these birds. So we were looking at the fish within these structures, and found that basically, you know, they drain them into canals during the summer, the water gets pretty low and oxygen, the fish basically die over the summer. So that was kind of the disappointing part of the project was finding how many fish die in these structures. But it did, again, kind of lend itself to thinking about management, how can we manage these things for more than one objective? Can we manage them to still, you know, promote the food for the birds that use them as they're either migratory migratory birds or shorebirds or? And then can we also think about better ways to manage them for for the fish? A lot of these fish are things like young of the year, you know, tarpan, or spot or croaker that the move into the estuary as as larvae and then move out after their first year. So you know, it's really an interesting project. It was a lot of time spent trying to figure out how to get them sample the fish and these things, but we finally figured it out. And, and yeah, so it was it was fun. It's beautiful area to work in as well.

Stuart Carlton 16:22
What's the simply challenge was like Is it like depth and there was just one to junk in the way like trees or whatever

Dr. Kelly Robinson 16:26
it was, it was more so these things are pretty clear. They're small canals that were sampling. But they were too saline to really do a good job with a shocker. They're very difficult to kind of get larger vessels into as well as some of these, you know, canals and maybe be like 10 feet wide. And so then we tried gill nets and things like that, but we're just not capturing the small fish. So we did end up using some rotenone to sample these things. And we've sampled Nina small sections with rotunno and then neutralized it afterwards.

Stuart Carlton 17:02
rotenone with Cecil, oh, my goodness, he had this one project. What was the big lake and as a different? Yep, yep. And so they got to just kind of standard contract with the DNR or whatever they would wrote in on these different coves. So what wrote known is maybe Kelly, you can fill me on details, but essentially what it is, is it some sort of chemical that I think makes it so fish can no longer breathe, get oxygen from the water, right? Yeah. Through the use of the power of chemistry. And so what you do is you like you tend to or you met off a cove in a lake is what we were doing. And you put some sort of antidote chemical, I think on the other side of the net, and then you put the rope known in the cove. And on the first day, like a bunch of fish will die and float up to the top. And that's all fine. And you get them and it's all bluegill and you just have to figure out what kind of bluegill or it's all sunfish, and you write down, you know, Leopold Miss species, or if you're really good, you can identify them. But but nobody actually can. Kelly probably could anyway. And then the problem is the first day is all fine. But then there's a second day. And the fish that were slower to float up or floated up overnight, and they develop a certain stench. Yeah, and then there's a third day. And the third day is the day for the undergraduate technicians and not the graduates. Because by the third day things are are bleak.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 18:27
And pretty, right? Yeah.

Stuart Carlton 18:30
Is this ethical? Yeah, it

Hope Charters 18:31
just sounds so mean, you're just like in order to sample you're just killing off a ton of them.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 18:39
So the whole goal with any of that sampling is really to get a handle on what's going on with the entire fish community. And these combs are not super large. I mean, it's these are huge reservoirs we were working in in Georgia, is on the border of Georgia and South Carolina. I want to say that that lake, someone told me one time that had more coastlines and the coast of California. It's a quite a large system. And so it's a small, you know, area that you're trying to just get a handle on what's going on with the entire fish community. It's not used that often. But sometimes it's the thing you have that you can use to get a sense of what's going on. Luckily, with my project and the impounded wetlands. I mean, luckily, I guess we had so many alligators and birds around that we couldn't do a second day pickup because they would just mow through everything overnight. So yeah, there was no need to pick up anything to the next day. Somebody else had already eaten it.

Hope Charters 19:36
They were being used. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 19:38
definitely. No, no, it's a good question open it's always worth thinking about right? But you can't go into fish biology without getting comfortable with the fact that over the course of your life you will kill

Dr. Kelly Robinson 19:46
you do have to you do have to kill some fish to get a handle on what's going on. I felt a little better with my own project that knowing that these fish likely weren't going to make it through the summer anyway, so fearing them that death I guess

Stuart Carlton 19:59
so. I'm so sorry. Alright, so I could reminisce about my days rotenone and coves for four hours. But I think that that's not the purpose that we're here. And so then you moved on to the Great Lakes where you are now. Right? How did that was that just because there was a job at Michigan State? And you being awesome got that? Or was there that you want to move into this area?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 20:21
Probably. So, yes, I think that is a really great opportunity for me in terms of the fit. So in between, you know, getting my PhD and coming here, I actually did a postdoc at Cornell and the New York Co Op unit, but it was had nothing to do with fish. So I did a lot of structured decision making work for things like turkey and deer harvest management, and thinking about endangered birds and stuff like that, which was really cool. But then, coming off of that, and trying to find a position in fisheries, I feel like a lot of times people will look at my CV and say, well, she's been working on deer, why is she applying for this job as a fisheries scientist. But I work now in the quantitative fishery Center, which is part of the Department of Fisheries wildlife, at MSU. And part of our goal is helping agencies around the Great Lakes to meet with their quantitative needs, and to help them make decisions using things like decision analysis. So they recognize what I've been doing and why, you know, I still would be a good fit, even though I'd spent a couple of years thinking about deer population dynamics, rather than the population dynamics fish. So I think it was just a really great fit to work here. Coming off of those other experiences in my my education,

Stuart Carlton 21:39
help us understand what decision analysis is and how you use that.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 21:44
So you'll kind of hear me say interest interchangeably decision analysis, or structured decision making. But the goal with all that is to help decision makers to walk through a series of steps to more transparently come to a decision. And so the way we do that is helping them to first kind of thinking about what the actual problem is, what is the decision that needs to be made, you know, all the aspects that you might not consider when you start to think about a decision, like, who are the stakeholders? Who are the actual decision makers? What's the spatial scale of this decision? How often is this decision going to be made all of these things that people don't often articulate when they need to make a management decision? And then it comes back to haunt them later, because they realized they weren't on the same page about what the decision was they were trying to make in the first place? And then we asked them to say, what are your values? What are the things that you want to achieve? What are these these objectives that we would say, if they are achieved would solve the problem. And then we finally get to the point where we say what are the actions that we could take to solve this, there's objectives to achieve those objectives. So we call values based because we're not jumping straight to the decision points that's jumping straight to the actions, then we spent a lot of time thinking about the modeling. So how can we predict how each action we could evaluate would would help us to achieve those objectives? So lots of quantitative modeling, working with experts digging into different data sources, and lots of different ways to think about just predicting how these different actions could achieve our objectives or not. Then we get to the trade offs, where we find that often, there's not one action that best achieves everything, everything everyone wants. So then how do we make those trade offs based on what we now know, could happen with these different actions, the whole goal is really just to break the decision down to work through the pieces of it, rather than trying to think about it all. When it's more difficult when you're just thinking about all at one time rather than in in small chunks, where you can kind of be a little more deliberate about it.

Hope Charters 23:41
You have like a real life example of one of the decisions you've helped people make in the Great Lakes.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 23:47
Yeah, sure. So the one, the one that I've been thinking about a lot recently, it revolves around invasive Asian carp. So you know, you've seen you've seen the videos, maybe of the silvercar, knocking people out of their lane out of their boats into the lakes and things like that. So the the one species that we actually have in the Great Lakes right now is grass carp, which is not knocking people out of their boats, but it's still you know, a concern, because it, you know, consumes the vegetation that other fish and birds and things like that might use during their lifecycle. So grass carp are we producing now on Lake Erie? And there's a lot of concern about how do we respond to this fish and at least control the numbers if not eradicate it. So we've worked with groups around Lake Erie, the different agencies and researchers that have been thinking about this problem, to walk through that same series of steps. So you know, we defined the problem in terms of it being Lake Erie, the decision makers are all the agencies that have decision making authority on Lake Erie, we identified objectives related to like ecological things like containing the population from growing or from moving into the other lakes, we had economic objective that was mostly not spending all All the money in the world to do it, we, you know, they wanted to have the money to do it. But we also recognize that any money spent in a management agency on one thing is not available for something else. And then we had objectives related to things like collateral damage from the actions you should you could take. So you might like spread some sort of pest fiscal side, like wrote known to kill that fish, but then you'd be damaging other parts of the ecosystem, like removing fish that you might want to have there. So thinking about that in terms of threatened and endangered species in terms of stakeholder needs, like fishers, who might be affected by the things that we could do, all these kinds of things came into the objectives. And so in this case, we evaluated some scenarios, because one thing we found is that we weren't really sure, and we had tons of ideas about things to do. But because it's an invasive species, nobody really knew exactly how these things might work out. It's a new ecosystem that this fish is coming into. So we spent some time trying to understand kind of how effective do we need to be to achieve our goals? And so that that's kind of where we landed at the end. Yes, that we said, we need to know more about how effective our gear are? Is it doing the job that it needs to do? Or do we need to come up with something else? And now we're kind of doing some gear evaluation surveys and trying to understand how effective we can be. That's kind of one of the examples there.

Stuart Carlton 26:20
I mean, so this just sounds like you get a ton of people in the room. Right? And I can tell you from Cornell note, I think about IT systems like classic stuff with like, Decker, and you know, in the Human Dimensions lab? Oh,

Dr. Kelly Robinson 26:30
yes, definitely. Yeah. Worked with Dan on some of that stuff. And

Stuart Carlton 26:34
so it's a bunch of people in a room and a lot of meetings that sounds like right, and I imagine you would never admit to this, of course, but imagine there are occasionally excruciating meetings. How do you how do you? Which is my words, not yours, but how do you? How do you decide who even to bring into the room for that kind of stuff? Like, it seems like you could have the whole universe there? Right?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 26:53
You could? And that's a really good question. I think it's something that we're still kind of, in some ways struggling with in the decision analysis for natural resources world. So the grasscourt project, you know, the people that we brought into the room were managers and biologists that worked for either state or federal agency or provincial agency on the Canadian side, or that were, you know, university researchers. So that one was a little bit more constrained, in terms of I mean, we still had a lot of people there, but, you know, largely professionals in the management world. But I think, you know, when we started to think about some of these other decisions related to, you know, harvesting fish, or things that are more, that would be more important or more interesting to anglers or other stakeholders, you know, trying to think about how you choose the people in the room, I think really can influence the decision that that comes out of it right. And so I think there's a lot of work still being done on trying to think more about the social science side of decision making, and how to integrate that social science into the ecological science that, you know, we kind of have a handle, and we may not know what's going on with a particular fish species, but we know how to create models, we know how to make predictions and evaluate those uncertainties. But working with more of the stakeholders and rights holders in the Great Lakes, we have a lot of different, you know, indigenous groups that have, you know, rights towards some of these different are towards our fisheries and wildlife resources. So, trying to bring all those different viewpoints in the room is difficult. And, you know, not perfect,

Stuart Carlton 28:27
but it's also like a real balance, right? Like, I can see an ethics case for a lot of, you know, like, like thinking about just ethically who should be involved. But also, I mean, you know, at some point, you got to balance, breadth with depth with actually getting stuff done to

Dr. Kelly Robinson 28:41
you do, and it does come down to trying to build trust with people to both for us as the facilitators and among each other. So yeah, that's yeah, that's

Stuart Carlton 28:50
what reminds me a lot of we do a lot of work in AOCs areas of concern. And we think about that with the diverse stakeholder groups there in the work that's being done and a lot of it a lot of its angular focus, because that's a real notable user group. Right. But thinking about building trust in other groups as well, or how do you measure trust? Yeah, it's hard, actually guide Mark, Mark Stern, in your hometown, or home state of Virginia is at Virginia Tech. Now. He does interesting work on trust and natural resource management. Check that out. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that your work makes me think of that the different types of trusts and how that can be evaluated and things like that. And so we do SDM, as I call it, SDM and so the with the grass carp, what are what are other like systems were, you know, systems, what are the right word? Cases, model what and places reapply that whenever

Dr. Kelly Robinson 29:37
any of that is fine. So I will say that, you know, coming into working at the quantitative fishery center or the QFC was great because of the Great Lakes region has already been primed from my predecessor, Mike Jones, who just retired, who's been working on these kinds of same social decision making or decision analytic issues with people around the Great Lakes for years. So it's a really great system to work in because they kind of want this kind of help with making decisions. And so you know, we've got problems where we're working on stocking Salmaan is in Lake Michigan or a little bit in Lake Huron, we're thinking about what are some of the other ones, I've got a new project that I've just started, where we're trying to understand how we can make Michigan's cold water streams more resilient to the changing ecosystem. So specifically, you know, not only climate change, but largely focused on climate change, and like land use change. And so we're starting to work with different stakeholders around the Asaba River and, and Michigan, trying, as a first case study, how can we think about ways to make the fishery and, you know, with the whole ecosystem more resilient to climate change, we're thinking about things like walleye harvest, we've been working with Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and different rights and user groups out there, to think about how best to harvest walleye and change their heart while I harvest management plan that's been in place for like 20 years and need some revisions. So working with the kind of fishery management zone councils and First Nations groups and maytee nations groups to try to get out of their goals and objectives and use up towards making a new management plan. So there's a couple of examples anyway, of the things that we've got going on.

Hope Charters 31:20
It feels like structured decision making can be applied to so many different things. So how do you decide? You know, because you're all about decisions? How do you decide what decisions actually need this kind of framework?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 31:32
I think one of the biggest things it does, it gets back a little bit to that trust thing, and just whether a group is, so I have this great graphic, I teach this class and instructor decision making for graduate students. And I didn't make the graph but one of my colleagues did, and it kind of shows like when you're in the the realm of structured decision making, but if you know, if you can't get a grip, even agree kind of on what the objectives are, or what the science is telling you, then you may need maybe outside the bounds of SEM, you may be more in kind of like conflict resolution, or they call it like joint factfinding, which I've never done. But you know, I think just there's a realm in which you know, you've got tangible objectives you can work towards achieving and you agree that this is at least the data that are available, then you can, it's useful to do the process. But

Stuart Carlton 32:19
so, in this modern age, it seems like the structure of decision making is becoming harder and harder. Since agreeing on facts seems to be something we do less, less and less. Yeah. So this is a cool tool, like so people want to go and find out more about structured decision making, is there is there is this the kind of thing where there is like a popular book on it, or is it you gotta go to the literature. And

Dr. Kelly Robinson 32:42
so there is a really nice book, and I think it's actually called structured decision making. It's, yeah, there's a group in British Columbia that wrote a book that it I mean, it's still towards science and natural resources, decision making, but it's still kind of accessible. There's also a book by Hammond, from 99. I think it's called making hard choices or something like that. And it talks about, you know, things like making decisions for buying a house or you know, how you could use the tenets of decision analysis for life choices, which I'm not great at doing.

Stuart Carlton 33:18
Virgo. Yep. So here's a structured decision making Practical Guide to environmental management choices.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 33:25
Yeah, so that one's more if you're interested in it for natural resources, decision making, it's a good first choice.

Stuart Carlton 33:31
And we'll put a link to that in our show notes. And we'll put also a link to what is it called making hard choices, that's the name of it. I'm gonna write one called punting on hard choices, a way to hit middle age and be vaguely dissatisfied. It'll be good bestseller. Good. Well, we'll put links to those in our show notes, which you can find it teach me about the great lakes.com/forty 343 Because this is episode 43. Believe it or not,

Dr. Kelly Robinson 34:02
I looked it up that is actually called Smart Choices. Not smart. You see,

Stuart Carlton 34:07
oh, but to me, those are easy choices.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 34:11
That's quite useful. Well, Kelly,

Stuart Carlton 34:13
this is really interesting stuff. And it sounds like a really powerful tool that I'm excited to see how it develops over time. But that's actually not why we invited you here on teach me about the Great Lakes this week. The reason? No, it's not. That's not the reason we invite you on teach me three lakes. It has two questions. The first of which is this. If you could have a if you could choose to have a great donor for breakfast, or a great sandwich for lunch, which would you choose?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 34:36
So that's an easy answer. I would say the sandwich for sure. But my husband was across the hall from me right now would be appalled that I would choose different. So yeah.

Stuart Carlton 34:47
Okay. All right. Sandwich. So you were at Michigan State. I mean, you're in East Lansing. Are you enhancing? Yeah. Alright, so when I go to visit, I'm gonna visit all star guest Brian Roth, who's gonna teach me about the Great Lakes Hall of Fame. And then when I'm done talking with Brian I'm, and he wants a cheesesteak. He's all about the cheesesteak sandwich. He said, He has strong opinions on cheese steaks. So I've had a cheesesteak sandwich. We wrote on a cove, pick a bunch of dead fish, have a cheesesteak wake up the next day, more dead fish. And I want another lunch. Cuz nothing like wrote known to make you want lunch? Where should I go? To get a really great sandwich?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 35:21
In East Lansing, there? I would say more than one good option for a good sandwich. But I do like Jersey giant, it's it's a kind of a local chain. Tons of giant sandwiches that are quite good. And you can customize them any way you want. I love that you just put

Hope Charters 35:37
like three feet in between your teeth.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 35:41
Yes, I can eat half of one and I'm too full. So

Stuart Carlton 35:45
yeah. All right, I will go in and I'll order the titular giant. Fantastic. And then now the second question is this. So you've been in the Great Lakes now for a number of years? Not as many as you will be hopefully for our sakes that you're doing such great work. Is there like a special place in the Great Lakes that you'd like to share with our audience? And if so, what makes it special to you?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 36:06
Yes, that's a really good question. Because it's I've been here five years, and I would say that I haven't visited as much as a Great Lakes is one should. In some ways, I feel like your listeners may be able to provide me with more options. But I was thinking about that one of the system prof

Stuart Carlton 36:21
life is

Dr. Kelly Robinson 36:22
right. I know. Yeah. But I think you know, obviously think about this good harbor beat on Lake Michigan, I think is probably one of my favorite places. It's my we used to have a friend that used to live in Traverse City and she would take us there to go to the beach. And it was my first time swimming in the Great Lakes, which was quite cold. And not what I was used to but it's a really, you know, beautiful area. There's not a lot of people on a beach. can look for photography stones find lots of photography stones.

Stuart Carlton 36:53
What's a photography stone? I don't know what to potassic is really

Hope Charters 36:57
like the weird little like circles of different colors do.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 36:59
Yeah, so photography stones are unique to the kind of Northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. There's actually a town called the TASKI. But they are coral that from back when there was a water pool. Yeah. So in you know, when you pick them up, you can see them better when they're wet. It's kind of hard to see all of the like little you can see all the pieces with how it looks like you know, coral after it has. So it's fossil coral from the Great Lakes. So it's super exciting when you find one on the beach, being a nerd about all things biology.

Stuart Carlton 37:37
And this the states don't a Michigan Look at that. Look at that. Alright,

Hope Charters 37:40
I visited one of our old employees and che who moved out to what's the boy Long Island in Michigan, something like that. Yeah, yeah. We picked up the Toschi stones and putting stones so if you find putting stones, they're also very fun.

Stuart Carlton 37:55
All right, what's a pudding? Look at this. I've learned so much about stones every time I talked to hope I've learned about stones. I

Hope Charters 38:00
think they have like little red dots.

Stuart Carlton 38:04
Okay, putting like, yeah, just like

Hope Charters 38:07
putting that up. But they have little red pieces.

Dr. Kelly Robinson 38:11
Tony how to check those next time, too.

Stuart Carlton 38:13
Oh, great. Well, I've learned so much. Is there a place you want to send people to find out more about your work due to social media or website?

Dr. Kelly Robinson 38:21
So we do the QFC has a website. You can Google is quantitative fishery center, Michigan State University. I have a Twitter handle if you know, occasionally I tweet things about science. It's at K filer Robinson.

Stuart Carlton 38:36
Great. Well, Dr. Kelly Robinson, assistant professor at the quantitative Fisheries Center in the department, Wildlife, Fisheries and Wildlife, excuse me and Michigan State University. Thank you so much for coming on and teaching us all about the Great Lakes. Yeah,

Dr. Kelly Robinson 38:47
thanks for having me. It's fun.

Stuart Carlton 38:59
Right, structured decision making hope. That's pretty, pretty important stuff, right?

Hope Charters 39:04
Oh, yeah. Definitely make structured decisions every day of my life. Completely

Stuart Carlton 39:10
different. So I was gonna say, wait a minute, holy hell. What am I doing wrong? If that structured decision making, what am I doing? Yeah, although what's really cool about it is it seems like she's working on you can apply to all these big issues, kind of like you were saying, right? I mean, if you look, she's looking at Lamprey, she's looking at carp. She's looking at you know, Samanid stocking which are, you know, the trials and things like that. So if you've read Death and Life of the great basically, she went chapter by chapter, through death and life, all these big issues, and is, is sort of working on those. So that's, that's, that's big, important work.

Hope Charters 39:42
Yeah, it almost sounds like they need somebody like her in every agency, working in the Great Lakes possible. sounds impressive. I've heard of structured decision making.

Stuart Carlton 39:53
Yeah, it's a way to do it. I mean, the problem is that agencies you know, it's hard to get agencies to move right, because they have mandates and and things like that. And then it's also it's an expensive time consuming process as part of it. I mean, not that expensive. It's expensive in terms of time, and having all these meetings and things like that. And that's kind of a bear. But I agree. I agree. I think hopefully, you'll see a lot more of that and formally modeling decisions and all that stuff. And foresee Yeah, so I was thinking what the row notes and the electrofishing we talked about, Have you have you gone? electrofishing? Is that something you've done? Remember, you had waiters, right?

Hope Charters 40:25
I do have waiters, I have not been electric. But electrofishing they don't die, right. So you're just like kind of shocking them, incapacitating them and then your sample and putting them back.

Stuart Carlton 40:38
That is generally true, but the little ones not gonna lie. The little it's just carnage. So there's, there's two types. It depends on what one like the boat electroshock, or, and I don't know the physics behind this so people can email us at teaching about the great lakes@gmail.com And I'll include your I'll respond to your email in the next episode, maybe. But the boat electro shockers like they think that will more often a backpack ones and so you're right on a boat. And that's where we're trying to get like the big red horse suckers. And you'll see just trails of fish that will assume, yeah, revive kind of later. But the point with the backpack ones is you're in the water, and I swear to fricking two things. One, my waiters always have holes in them, which means that you get a little bit of water and your waiter and also just a little a little, a little some electricity. But But the worst thing is, is I'm such a moron that like if I don't have you can get gloves, but you don't always have the gloves if you want to keep your hands like out of the water, right. But I'll see a fish that we're looking for like a target species swimming by. And so I'll have one hand I'll let go of the electroshock or and I'll grab the this has happened every time I go electro fishing. And so you grab the fish, and you're like, or, you know, maybe I remember to put mine but I forget that I'm with a whole group of people all carrying, you know, one of these SmithGroup backpack shockers. So I have grabbed electro fishing water, like dozens of times. And I'm just hard. This is why I went into social science. I suppose I'm not cut out for this.

Hope Charters 42:11
It makes a lot more sense now.

Stuart Carlton 42:13
Yeah. That's where the hair came from through. Um, anyway. Cool. Let's see. Well, I think that is about it. Hey, thanks, everybody, for listening. It's super fun to do this. And so what I'm going to do now, is I'm going to start up the thing and read the credits. So let's hope would you like to read the credits? Yes, I

Unknown Speaker 42:34
would love to read the credits. All right. All right, hold on.

Stuart Carlton 42:37
So because of the audio difficulties we had, this all stays in Quincy, everybody can hear just how competent we are. You won't be able to hear the but there's going to be some music behind you. You won't be able to hear it but goodwill and hopefully the audience will. But I have to find the music. And so when I say go then you're going to do it. So are you ready to roll? I'm so prepared. Okay, good. Then go.

Hope Charters 43:03
Teach me about the Great Lakes is brought to you by the fine people Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, we encourage you to check out the great work we do I see grant.org and i Li N Sea Grant on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. Teach me about the Great Lakes produced by hook charters. Carolyn Foley Megan Gunn and reviles youth and Judy is our associate producer and fixer are super fun podcast artwork is by Joe Davenport. And the show is I'm Quinn Rose and I encourage you to check out her work at aspiring robot.com If you have a question or comment about the show, please email it to teach me about the great lakes@gmail.com or leave a message on our hotline because we totally have a hotline at 765496 I SG You can also follow me on Twitter at Teach Great Lakes. Thanks for listening and keep greatin' those lakes!