Our Vision
A peaceful world in which large lake ecosystems are valued and healthy; where these ecosystems inspire curiosity, awe, love and respect, and stewardship in all people.
Our Core Values
Collaboration
We value working together across disciplines, knowledge systems, and domains of expertise by sharing knowledge, building partnerships, and cooperating internationally. Just as ecological health depends on complex and interconnected relationships, our success depends on collaboration with others.
Diversity and Inclusion
We believe in co-creating a just, equitable, and inclusive culture that removes barriers to participation in our activities and embraces people from diverse identities, perspectives, and experiences.
Excellence
We value promoting excellence in large lake research by sharing contemporary findings that meet professional standards in our programs. Further, we aspire to create an environment where we elevate and inspire one another in the pursuit of excellence.
Learning
We embrace embracing learning to inform adaptive decision making regarding the world’s large lake ecosystems. We reflect this learning in our practices and programs. This learning encompasses basic and applied research, seeks to understand varied perspectives, and supports current and future scientists.
Stewardship
We believe in promoting stewardship of large lake ecosystems by sharing research findings and offering trusted evidence to support informed decisions in the pursuit of sustainable, healthy ecosystems. We seek to empower scientists and practitioners to carry on this work.
Our Beliefs
The world’s large lakes are vital resources that provide important ecosystem services, and we have a responsibility to understand and protect these environments for current and future generations.
We are uniquely positioned (through our history and past efforts) to be a trusted source of science-based knowledge about the Laurentian Great Lakes and other large lake ecosystems.
Through science we can better understand large lake ecosystems and provide the basis for more effective policy and management; a deeper understanding will lead to better decisions.
An interdisciplinary, collaborative approach is required to understand an ecosystem.
Multiple ways of knowing, including Traditional Ecological Knowledge, are vital for understanding an ecosystem and the role humans have in maintaining its sustainability.