FishTail: June 9 Webinar on Conserving Stream Fish Habitats
FishTail, a decision support mapper for conserving stream fish habitats of the NE CSC region, will be demonstrated on a webinar on Thursday, June 9, 2pm EST.
Human impacts occurring throughout the NE CSC, including urbanization, agriculture, and dams, have multiple effects on the region’s streams which support economically valuable stream fishes. Changes in climate are expected to lead to additional changes in stream habitats and fish assemblages in multiple ways, including changing stream water temperatures. To manage streams from current impacts and future changes, managers need region-wide information for decision-making and developing proactive management strategies. The NE CSC funded project, A Decisions Support Mapper for Conserving Stream Fish Habitats of the NE CSC Region, led by Craig Pauckert, meets that need by integrating results of a current condition assessment of stream habitats based on fish response to human land use, water quality impairment, and fragmentation by dams with estimates of which stream habitats may change in the future. Results will be available for all streams in the NE CSC region through a spatially-explicit, web-based viewer, FishTail. With this tool, managers can evaluate how streams of interest are currently impacted by land uses and assess if those habitats may change with climate. These results, available in a comparable way throughout the NE CSC, provide natural resource managers, decision-makers, and the public a wealth of information to better protect and conserve stream fishes and their habitats.
To ensure that assessment of current and future threats to stream fish habitats were most relevant to stakeholders of the NE CSC region, we held a webinar in May, 2014. We presented data that would be used in developing current and future threat indices and elements of our analytical approach, and we asked stakeholders to provide us with information on fish species of interest in the region that would be most important in developing indices. This meeting will show results of current and future threat index development, highlighting their association with species of interest. Also, since this project was proposed, additional climate data have been made available for the region, allowing us to use results from multiple climate models to create our future threat indices. This modification to our original product will also be highlighted.
Topic: Fishtail Webinar (90)
Date: Thursday, June 9, 2016
Time: 2:00 pm, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)
Link: https://usgs.webex.com/usgs/j.php?MTID=m201c7334988a13daf0809554f3a5f664
