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Simulating Metacommunities of Riverine Fishes: Trials and Tribulations
Citation:
Beebe, B., Joe Ebersole, A. Brookes, AND B. Rashleigh. Simulating Metacommunities of Riverine Fishes: Trials and Tribulations. Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society, Baltimore, MD, November 06 - 10, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
Protection and management of the nation's freshwater fishes can benefit from tools that help anticipate the responses of fish populations to changes in the aquatic environment. EPA is developing a fish assemblage modeling tool to assist with stream and river assessments and restoration planning. In this talk we desribe some of the challenges associated with assemblage modeling, and describe how we are attempting to account for and communicate the uncertainties associated with this type of ecological modeling.
Description:
Salmonid populations have undergone prolonged declines even amidst a plethora of conservation efforts. Inevitably, future climate and land use changes will continue to strain our ability to manage fish populations, requiring targeted approaches for conservation activities to focus our efforts and resources more effectively. We are developing a fish community modeling framework, Simulating Metacommunities of Riverine Fishes (SMRF), to showcase our application of assemblage modeling to evaluate changes in fish abundances in response to stream restoration activities, with a focus on recovering threatened salmonid species. Because salmonid recovery is contingent on habitat quality and quantity as well as community dynamics, our model integrates aspects of movement, habitat suitability, and species interactions to increase the element of realism; however, this added complexity also presents some challenges. We explore details of some of the challenges we have encountered with model calibration using imperfect data, highlight our methods for remedying these issues to improve model performance, and discuss anticipated challenges with interpreting and conveying meaningful model results.