Ty Wagner   Post-Doctoral Associate Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Quantitative Fisheries Center

My research interests include examining how spatial and temporal variability, human activities (stressors), and aquatic ecosystems interact, and how controlling variables change with the spatial scale of observation. These concepts, variability and scale or hierarchy, where the focal area of study is constrained by large-scale dynamics, have direct implications for the conservation and management of aquatic ecosystems. Within this framework, I am also interested in monitoring and assessment issues. Monitoring and assessment programs that quantify and take into account important sources of variability during the design process are essential to describing current conditions, identifying reference conditions, and for determining how ecosystems have and continue to change over time. A well-designed monitoring program is also fundamental to identifying the effects of human stressors on aquatic systems and to evaluating the effectiveness of management actions.

I received my Master’s degree from the University of Idaho where my research focused on the macrophyte ecology in Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho’s largest and deepest lake. In particular I examined the response of the macrophyte community to lake water level management. After completion of my Master’s degree, I worked as a research associate at the University of Idaho where I participated in a study that examined the physiological ecology of migrating wild and hatchery Chinook salmon smolts. I received my Ph.D. from the Fisheries and Wildlife Department at Michigan State University. My dissertation research focused on the development of decision tools for inland lake management through field sampling and statistical modeling.

Currently, I am a post-doctoral research associate at the Quantitative Fisheries Center (QFC) at Michigan State University. The QFC provides research, outreach/services, and teaching programs to university faculty and students, as well as management agencies around the Great Lakes. As part of the QFCs outreach and teaching objectives, I developed an introductory short course for using R, a programming environment for data analysis and graphing. In addition to these outreach endeavors, my research at the QFC focuses on the analysis and synthesis of pathological and fatty acid data from four lake whitefish stocks in Lakes Michigan and Huron in an effort to provide insight into empirically derived natural mortality rates.

Wagner, T., Bence, J. R., Bremigan, M. T., Hayes, D. B., and Wilberg, M. J. In press. Regional trends   in fish mean length at age: components of variance and the power to detect trends. Canadian     Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. 

Wagner, T., Bremigan, M. T., Spence Cheruvelil, K., Soranno, P. A., Nate, N. N., and Breck, J. E.          2006. A multilevel modeling approach to assessing regional and local landscape features for lake      classification and assessment of fish growth rates. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment. DOI     10.1007/s10661-006-9434-z. (abstract)

Wagner, T. Jubar, A. K., and Bremigan, M. T. 2006. Can habitat alteration and spring angling explain   black bass nest distribution and success? Transactions of the American Fisheries Society     135:843-852. (abstract)

Wagner, T., Hayes, D. B., and Bremigan, M. T. 2006. Accounting for multilevel data structures in fisheries data using mixed models. Fisheries 31:180-187.  (abstract)

Congleton, J. L. and Wagner T. 2006. Blood-chemistry indicators of nutritional status in juvenile salmonids. Journal of Fish Biology 69:473-790. (abstract)

Zabel, R. W., Wagner T., Congleton J. L., Smith, S. G., Williams, S. G. 2005. Survival and selection of migrating salmon from capture-recapture models with individual traits. Ecological Applications 15:1427-1439.  (abstract)

Wagner, T., Congleton, J. L. 2004. Blood-chemistry correlates of nutritional condition, tissue damage, and stress in migrating juvenile chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha). Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 61:1066-1074.  (abstract)

Wagner, T., Congleton, J. L., and Marsh, D. M. 2004. Smolt-to-adult return rates of juvenile chinook salmon transported through the Snake-Columbia River hydropower system, USA, in relation to densities of co-transported juvenile steelhead. Fisheries Research 68:259-270.  (abstract)

Wagner, T. and Falter, C. M. 2002. Response of an aquatic macrophyte community to fluctuating water levels in an oligotrophic lake. Lake and Reservoir Management 18:52-65.