Impact/Purpose:

This work is designed to provide EPA Program Offices and Regions with simple, validated stressor-response models that can quantify the effects of alteration or loss of major lake or estuarine habitats on populations and communities of valuable fish, shellfish, and wildlife. The major purpose is to inform the development of criteria to protect living aquatic resources from degradation. This project focuses on coastal ecosystems where the interactions of multiple habitats predominantly determine the condition of fish, shellfish, and wildlife populations.

Description:

Habitat alteration is well recognized as a major cause of loss of living aquatic resources. Many fish and wildlife species depend on several habitats (or on habitat landscapes) in their life histories and migratory patterns. This NHEERL habitat research will develop stressor-response models and approaches for applying the Tiered Aquatic Life Uses framework to estuaries and coasts. Habitat alteration (the stressor) and population or community response will be evaluated at the scale of habitat landscapes on aquatic shorelines (including shallow and intertidal habitats through deeper water habitats) or at the scale of an entire lake, cove, estuary, or sub-estuary. These habitat alteration-biotic response models will also be designed to fit into spatially explicit risk assessment population models. A subsequent goal is to produce larger models that integrate responses of multiple species to habitat alterations. As steps in this research, we will identify the high-priority populations of fish, shellfish, and wildlife in each region; identify the habitats critical to these populations; and characterize the contributions of each habitat to life-support for these populations. Much of this will be accomplished through synthesizing the available literature. We will then develop and validate habitat alteration-population response relationships (classified, quantitative stressor-response models) for identified species and habitats in each region at the scale of the shoreline, lake, or estuary. In the simplest example, these models may take the form of empirical relationships between abundance of two or more habitats and juvenile densities of a coastal-dependent species. These models are intended to predict quantitative changes in fish, shellfish, and wildlife resource value that would result from habitat alteration to a habitat-mapped shoreline, lake, or estuary. As needed, we will develop methods for broad scale regional surveys to determine reference condition, and/or we will develop classification schemes to allow model extrapolation where other factors (e.g., geomorphology, salinity, tidal energy) affect how habitats support populations. Our primary goal is to provide a scientific basis for applying the Tiered Aquatic Life Use approach to coasts and estuaries using habitat stressor-response models for high-priority populations and communities of fish, shellfish, and wildlife.

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