| Summary: | How a water body’s temperature characteristics constrain organisms ecologically has been a continuing focus of interest in limnology and aquatic ecology for over a century now. A number of complementary scientific approaches are reviewed briefly. Progress in assessment of climate change is hampered by the still fragmentary and scattered scientific literature. A number of tentative generalizations are sketched. We expect that climate change of a type consistent with currently available scenarios will have severe consequences for Great Lakes fish and fisheries: in rivers that flow south, east or west and which contain isolated endemic species at the northerly edge of their ranges and which have no opportunity to migrate northwards; and where effects on the aquatic ecosystem of climate change interact synergistically and harmfully, as seems likely, with bad effects of other cultural stresses such as damming and nutrient loading. peerReviewed
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