Freshwater Resilience, All Streams, Stratified by Fish Region and Freshwater Ecoregion, Northeast U.S.

Publication Date

2013-05-13

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Ecosystem resilience is the ability of an ecosystem to retain essential processes and support native diversity in the face of disturbances or expected shifts in ambient conditions (definition modified from Gunderson 2000). As growing human populations increase the pace of climate and land use changes, estimating the resilience of freshwater systems will be increasingly important for delivering effective long-term conservation. We developed and conducted a region-wide analysis of freshwater stream networks to estimate the capacity of each network to cope with climatic and environmental change. Please find the full report at https://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationByGeography/NorthAmerica/UnitedStates/edc/Documents/FW%20resilience_5_28_2013_distribute.docx . Our analysis centered on the evaluation of characteristics that may allow stream ecosystems to maintain diversity and function within a dynamic climate, and that could be modeled in GIS with confidence at the regional scale and were not highly correlated with each other. Essentially, we identify stream networks that offer a wide diversity of options and microhabitats for species, and that have a higher likelihood of having functional key ecological processes. We do not predict exactly how the dynamics between streams and climate will play out. Presumably, the network’s species composition will change with climate, and likewise, processes will continue to operate although not in the same range of variation that they currently do. However, the identified higher relative resilient networks are places we hypothesize have a high likelihood of maintaining a diversity of species and natural communities, basic relationships and key ecological processes, and that will allow for adaptive change in composition and structure in the future. In this dataset, we present the entire source population of 1438 networks that contained small river (size 2: > 100 sq.km drainage area) and were at least 2 miles long that were analyzed in this project. The final 346 "complex networks" that we estimated to have the highest resilience can be queried out of this dataset using the field "CNTSZ_GE5 = 1" or can be found in the dataset "complex_networks_distribute.shp".

ArcGIS Mapping Service

WMS Service

• LC MAP - Landscape Conservation Management and Analysis Portal
• North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative

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