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Modeling Responses of Riverine Fish Assemblages to Habitat and Water Quality Improvements
Citation:
Beebe, B., J. Ebersole, A. Brookes, B. Rashleigh, M. Papenfus, AND H. Lesch. Modeling Responses of Riverine Fish Assemblages to Habitat and Water Quality Improvements. American Fisheries Society Annual Meeting, Spokane, WA, August 21 - 26, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
This research aims to advance methods for understanding the potential benefits of improvements in water quality and aquatic habitats. Understanding what people value can be informed by models that can quantify willingness-to-pay for specified endpoints. Translating water quality or habitat improvements into fish endpoints valued by people requires models that can link fish population responses to projected improvements. In this presentation, we outline an approach for linking water quality/habitat improvements to fish populations, and translate fish population responses into endpoints valued by humans. By linking fish population and economic models, we illustrate some of the challenges and opportunities for advancing our ability to forecast the benefits of improvements to aquatic ecosystems.
Description:
Successful and efficient restoration of fish habitats and populations requires making well-informed decisions about when and where to implement various conservation practices. Operating within the bounds of limited resources and with imperfect information about complex ecological processes, managers must make difficult decisions that will likely become increasingly more challenging with changing climate. In this presentation, we showcase a fish assemblage model that incorporates fish habitat suitability, species interactions, and movement to explore future scenarios of water quality and habitat improvement and effects on fish populations. We are building these models to help inform estimates of the economic value of salmon recovery (see talk by Papenfus et al., this session). . We discuss model dynamics that can lead to counterintuitive responses of fish populations to habitat modifications and water quality improvements. Exploring these multifaceted dynamics through assemblage modeling can prove useful for understanding when and where conservation actions may or may not provide the greatest ecological benefits. Additionally, we briefly discuss the challenges and trade-offs associated with implementing ecological complexity in fish-habitat models and conclude with considerations for future integration of fish population models with economic analyses.