Joseph M. Hennessy

• MS Zoology/ Fisheries Sciences, Southern Illinois
• Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

Proliferation of warmwater fish in northern lakes has significant implications for food web structure and fisheries management. Specifically, proliferation of centrarchids (e.g., largemouth bass Micropterus salmoides, bluegill Lepomis macrochirus, and black crappie Pomoxis nigromaculatus) could have important implications for yellow perch Perca fla...

Some northern Wisconsin lakes have shown declines in catches of age‐0 Walleye Sander vitreus in standardized fall electrofishing sampling, suggesting that recruitment bottlenecks are occurring in the first several months of life. In 2016 and 2017, we sampled six lakes with declining trends in natural Walleye recruitment (D‐NR lakes) and seven lakes...

Recruitment of age‐0 Walleye Sander vitreus is often indexed using fall electrofishing surveys. However, collecting fish before fall may provide timely information regarding stocking decisions and factors influencing recruitment. We evaluated sampling methods for age‐0 Walleye in northern Wisconsin lakes that could be used to assess recruitment in...

Recreational fisheries are valued at $190B globally and constitute the predominant way in which people use wild fish stocks in developed countries, with inland systems contributing the main fraction of recreational fisheries. Although inland recreational fisheries are thought to be highly resilient and self-regulating, the rapid pace of environment...

The Safe Operating Space (SOS) of a recreational fishery is the multidimensional region defined by levels of harvest, angler effort, habitat, predation and other factors in which the fishery is sustainable into the future. SOS boundaries exhibit trade-offs such that decreases in harvest can compensate to some degree for losses of habitat, increases...

In Wisconsin, the management of Walleyes Sander vitreus relies on a set of log‐linear regressions to predict Walleye abundance and to set safe harvest. The regression models predict mean Walleye abundance from lake area, but they ignore variability among years; they also predict equal Walleye populations in lakes with the same size and recruitment...

We classified walleye (Sander vitreus) recruitment with 81% accuracy (recruitment success and failure predicted correctly in 84% and 78% of lake-years, respectively) using a random forest model. Models were constructed using 2779 surveys collected from 541 Wisconsin lakes between 1989 and 2013 and predictor variables related to lake morphometry, th...

Predicting recruitment is a long-standing goal in fisheries management. To guide management of Wisconsin’s Walleye (Sander vitreus), we predicted the probability of successful recruitment, defined as fall young-of-year Walleye catch rates greater than 10/mile, based on 2,210 surveys in 303 lakes conducted from 1989-2012 in Wisconsin’s Ceded Territo...

Walleyes Sander vitreus are an important cultural and economic resource in northern Wisconsin, both as a recreational fishery and a tribal subsistence fishery. Understanding the recruitment of age‐0 walleyes to the adult population could be of great utility in effectively managing harvest and informing stocking efforts in this mixed‐use fishery. Ou...

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is a federal program that encourages the planting of cool- or warm-season grass cover on highly erodible croplands and along stream corridors. We sought to determine whether fish community structure in coldwater streams was associated with CRP and other agricultural land use changes in southwestern Wisconsin....

To determine whether creel survey efficiency can be improved in northern Wisconsin lakes, we compared estimates of effort, harvest rate, harvest, recapture rate for previously marked fish (R/C ratio), and recaptures of walleyes Sander vitreus from four reduced-sampling-effort schemes (eliminating 1 week per month, 2 weeks per month, odd-numbered we...

In regions where water resources are abundant, broad-scale fisheries management requires quantifying fishery trends on a representative sample of lakes and then using these data to evaluate management actions and assess fishery status. Therefore, we quantified regional fishery profiles of the average number of complete-trip interviews, effort per a...

To test for violations of the assumptions of mark–recapture studies used to estimate angling exploitation rates of walleye Sander vitreus in northern Wisconsin lakes, we estimated the recapture rate (R/C) of walleyes previously marked for each month of the angling year for five length categories: all lengths combined, less than 12 in, 12–15 in, 15–...

"Department of Zoology." Thesis (M.S.)--Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 2001. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 37-40).