Impact/Purpose:

The Office of Water (OW), EPA Regions, and an interagency effort on salmon restoration in the Pacific Northwest will benefit directly from this research. It provides the scientific basis for the protection of wild salmon and migratory wildlife, whose populations are at risk due to large-scale changes in their habitats (including water quality). Reseach will provide the tools for explicit evaluation of the effects of human activities at landscape and watershed scales on salmon and native fish, including wild Pacific salmon and economically and ecologically important Great Lakes fishes, as well as evaluation of how habitat spatial structure and connectivity in stream networks, wetlands, lakes, and estuaries influence these fish and overall aquatic biodiversity.

Description:

The research described in this project deals with the influence of human activities on aquatic and aquatic-dependent biota at landscape, watershed, and regional scales. Specifically, it will examine watershed and landscape scale habitat issues affecting salmon and native fishes in the Pacific Northwest, and fishes reliant upon Great Lake coastal wetlands. In the Great Lakes, research will focus on coastal wetland fish assemblages. Initial efforts to understand landscape influences on coastal wetland habitat condition and native fishes will be based on field studies designed to help build quantitative empirical models that can eventually be used to construct more process-oriented models. In the Pacific Northwest, research will focus on wild Pacific salmon and native fish, and efforts will be based on an integrated modeling/field study approach. Upland and riparian effects on in-stream and coastal wetland condition will be examined. Research in the Pacific Northwest will also address the ecological consequences of decline of salmon-derived nutrients for riparian and aquatic ecosystems, focusing on the potential effects on salmon and other native fish populations and productivity. Research will be developed to allow for comparisons of factors influencing native fish assemblages in the two regions, and we will be looking at the effects of network structure and connectivity on fish movement. This work will primarily be conducted in the Pacific Northwest, but many of the same habitat connectivity issues are relevant to the Great Lakes studies and will be implicitly incorporated into their design. Field research and modeling efforts also will be developed to understand how activities aimed at managing salmon would affect other fish species, in particular, native fish.

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