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Sport fisheries of lakes are embedded in complex system of ecological and social interactions. The multiple drivers that affect lake sport fisheries, along with the complex interactions within lakes, make it difficult to forecast changes in sport fisheries and plan adaptive responses to build resilience of these important resources. Resilience involves managing with an eye toward critical thresholds for behavior of ecosystems. Project researchers are working to develop quantitative tools for assessment of thresholds in sport fisheries that can be used by management agencies to evaluate potential impacts of climate change mediated through species and habitat interactions. Several outputs of the project will be adaptable...
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Inland fish populations are a crucial resource to humans and communities around the world. Recreational fishing throughout the United States, for example, provides important revenue to local and state economies; globally, inland fisheries are a vital food source for billions of people. Warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, however, are already causing significant changes to fish communities worldwide. Since the mid-1980s, scientists have projected the effects of climate change on inland fish, and in more recent years, documentation of impacts has increased. However, the number of documented impacts of climate change on inland fish remains low. A comprehensive understanding of how climate change...
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Climate change is expected to worsen the harmful effects of invasive species on native wildlife. This presents a growing conservation challenge for invasive species managers in the southeastern United States where thousands of invasive species exist. While many of these invasive species currently have relatively small ranges in the southeastern U.S., climate change may allow them to expand into new regions. To effectively plan and respond to the redistribution of invasive species, it is crucial to coordinate existing information and identify future information needs across regional boundaries. The ultimate goal of this project is to improve invasive species management in the face of climate change by establishing...
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Society makes substantial investments in federal, Tribal, state, and private programs to supplement populations of valued species such as stocking fish, planting trees, rebuilding oyster reefs, and restoring prairies. These important efforts require long-term commitment, but climate change is making environmental conditions less predictable and more challenging to navigate. Selection of species for population supplementation is often based on performance prior to release, and one or a few species may then be used for decades even as the environment is changing. When these species are propagated in large numbers, they can become the dominant population as well as genetically overtake any local adaptations. Therefore,...
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The Southeastern U.S. spans broad ranges of physiographic settings and contains a wide variety of aquatic systems that provide habitat for hundreds of endemic aquatic species that pose interesting challenges and opportunities for managers of aquatic resources, particularly in the face of climate change. For example, the Southeast contains the southernmost populations of the eastern brook trout and other cold-water dependent species. Climate change is predicted to increase temperatures in the South and is likely to have a substantial effect on extant populations of cold-water biota. Thus, aquatic managers are tasked with developing strategies for preserving cold-water dependent biota, such as eastern brook trout,...
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Throughout its native range in the Eastern U.S., the brook trout is a culturally and economically important species that is sensitive to warming stream temperatures and habitat degradation. The purpose of this assessment was to determine the impacts that projected future land use and climate changes might have on the condition of stream habitat to support self-sustaining brook trout populations. The study region encompassed the historic native range of brook trout, which includes the northeastern states and follows the Appalachian Mountains south to Georgia, where the distribution is limited to higher elevation streams with suitable water temperatures. Relationships between recent observations of brook trout and...
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Recreational angling in the U.S. represents a large group of people that catch and harvest fish for a variety of reasons, including for relaxation, adventure, social motivations, and consumption. Collectively, recreational anglers can exert pressures on both economies and fishery resources. Fish removals by anglers represent an important source of mortality data when trying to understand fish populations, and this information is even more important when the fishery is dominated by recreational and subsistence fishing. Currently, the magnitude of recreational angling is measured at local scales (for example, at a specific lake or stream) and the process to collect information from anglers varies widely by state...
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Inland fishes provide important ecosystem services to communities worldwide and are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Fish respond to climate change in diverse and nuanced ways, which creates challenges for practitioners of fish conservation, climate change adaptation, and management. Although climate change is known to affect fish globally, a comprehensive online, public database of how climate change has impacted inland fishes worldwide and adaptation or management practices that may address these impacts does not exist. We conducted an extensive, systematic primary literature review to identify peer-reviewed journal publications describing projected and documented examples of climate change...
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Studying the impacts of climate on important ecological responses is a recent priority of monitoring programs throughout the Northeast. Established sampling protocols for data collection, whether to inform estimates of species abundance or occupancy, were designed to evaluate the effects of non-climate stressors (e.g., habitat conversion) and related management actions. Traditional modeling approaches may not accurately identify important relationships between species and climate nor elicit useful information on how these species will be impacted by climate change. Management decisions based on these traditional modeling approaches could have negative and unintended consequences on species and habitat conservation....
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Climate change is causing species to shift their phenology, or the timing of recurring life events such as migration and spawning, in variable and complex ways. This can potentially result in mismatches or asynchronies in food and habitat resources that negatively impact individual fitness, population dynamics, and ecosystem function. Numerous studies have evaluated phenological shifts in terrestrial species, particularly birds and plants, yet far fewer evaluations have been conducted for marine animals. This project sought to improve our understanding of shifts in the timing of seasonal migration, spawning or breeding, and biological development (i.e. life stages present, dominant) of coastal fishes and migratory...
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Cold-water adapted Brook Trout were historically widely distributed – ranging from northern Quebec to Georgia, and from the Atlantic Ocean to Manitoba in the north, and along the Appalachian ridge in the south. However, studies show that due to factors associated with climate change, such as increased stream temperature and changing water flow, the number of streams containing Brook Trout is declining. Although efforts have been made to protect and restore this cold-water fish at local levels, the extent that temperature increases will vary within and across different streams and the ability of Brook Trout to seek cold-water refugia or adapt to these increasing stream temperatures currently remains unclear. The...
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The smallmouth bass (SMB) is a widespread species with a distribution that extends throughout the eastern and central U.S., in addition to introduced populations in other regions. From a management perspective, the SMB is important both as a popular sport fish and as a threat to native species where it is present outside of its natural range. Understanding the population-level responses of this species to environmental change is thus a priority for fisheries resource managers. This project aimed to explicitly model the impacts of projected climate and land use change on the growth, population dynamics, and distribution of stream-dwelling SMB in the U.S. Impacts on growth and demographic variables were modeled using...
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Marine and inland fisheries provide substantial economic, nutritional, recreational, and cultural benefits to human populations globally. Though extensive research and management efforts exist to ensure the sustainability of these important resources, many fisheries still face threats including climate change, habitat degradation, and overfishing. The inland fisheries community often cites that less attention is given to inland fisheries compared to marine but, to date, no quantitative analysis has examined these differences. Our goal is to compare investment and resources allocated to the research and management of marine and inland fisheries relative to their value at a global scale. Through the development of...
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A large portion of the U.S. population lives in coastal areas along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and the Caribbean; however, our coasts are also home to many fish, wildlife, and plant species that are important for recreation, tourism, local economies, biodiversity, and healthy coastal ecosystems. Coastal habitats also provide protective ecosystem services to human communities, which are increasingly at risk to storms and sea level rise under future climate change. Understanding how climate change will impact natural and human communities is a crucial part of decision making and management related to the protection of our coasts. In a collaborative project between the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative...
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Inland recreational fishing, defined as primarily leisure-driven fishing in freshwaters, is a popular past-time in the USA. State natural resource agencies endeavor to provide high-quality and sustainable fishing opportunities for anglers. Managers often use creel and other angler-survey data to inform state- and waterbody-level management efforts. Despite the broad implementation of angler surveys and their importance to fisheries management at state scales, regional and national coordination among these activities is minimal, limiting data applicability for larger-scale management practices and research. The goal of this project is to develop and implement the U.S. Inland Creel and Angler Survey Catalog (CreelCat),...
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Species that inhabit the arid Southwest are adapted to living in hot, dry environments. Yet the increasing frequency and severity of drought in the region may create conditions that even these hardy species can’t survive. This project examined the impacts of drought in the southwestern U.S. on four of the region’s iconic species: desert bighorn sheep, American pronghorn, scaled quail, and Rio Grande cutthroat trout. Grasping the impacts of drought on fish and wildlife is critical for management planning in the Southwest, as climate models project warmer, drier conditions for the region in the future. Species are known to respond to environmental changes such as drought in different ways. Often, before changes...
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There are significant investments by states and resource agencies in the northeast U.S. for invasive aquatic species monitoring and management. These investments in jurisdictional waters help maintain their use for drinking, industry, and recreation. It is essential to understand the risks from invasive species, because once established, species can be costly to society and difficult or impossible to control. Identifying which species are most likely to move into a new region and cause harmful impacts can aid in preventing introductions and establishment. This is especially important in response to climate change as habitats potentially become usable to previously range-restricted species. Currently, hundreds...
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Changes in the Earth’s climate are expected to impact freshwater habitats around the world by altering water temperatures, water levels, and streamflow. These changes will have consequences for inland fish – those found within lakes, rivers, streams, canals, reservoirs, and other landlocked waters – which are important for food, commerce, and recreation around the world. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in 2011, 33.1 million people fished and spent $41.8 billion in the United States alone. Yet to date, little comprehensive research has been conducted to investigate the effects of climate change on inland fisheries at a large scale. The aim of this project was to summarize the current state of...
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Inland fisheries make up more than 50% of all food fish in the world. Sustainable inland fisheries can support global economic development by providing food for billions and livelihood for millions of people worldwide. However, it can be difficult to quantitatively track and evaluate the services that inland fisheries provide to communities, which ultimately means that the contributions of this important sector to global development and sustainability are often undervalued. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests inland fisheries have disproportionate importance for impoverished countries. However, the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the associated Sustainable Development Goals...
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Madagascar, a country rich in natural capital and biodiversity but with high levels of poverty, food insecurity, and population growth, faces a number of development challenges, including obtaining sustained financial support from external sources and building internal capacity to address the poor environmental, health, and socio-economic conditions. Climate change poses an increasing threat to achieving development goals and is usually considered in development plans and project designs. However, there have been numerous challenges in the effective implementation of those plans, particularly in the sustained engagement of the communities to undertake adaptive actions but also due to insufficient scientific information...
map background search result map search result map USGS-USFS Partnership to Help Managers Evaluate Conservation Strategies for Aquatic Ecosystems Based on Future Climate Projections Projected Vulnerability of Brook Trout to Climate and Land Use Changes in the Eastern U.S. (Regional Assessment) Projected Climate Change Impacts on Stream Dwelling Smallmouth Bass Populations in the U.S. (Local Assessment) The Impacts of Drought on Fish and Wildlife in the Southwestern U.S. Climate Change and Resilience of Sport Fisheries in Lakes State of the Science on the Effects of Climate Change on North American Inland Fishes Implications of Future Shifts in Migration, Spawning, and Other Life Events of Coastal Fish and Wildlife Species A Value and Investment Assessment of Marine and Inland Fisheries Globally to Inform Future Resource Management Strategies Fish and Climate Change (FiCli) Database: Informing Climate Change Adaptation and Management Actions for Freshwater Fishes Global Analysis of Trends in Projected and Documented Effects of Climate Change on Inland Fish Identifying Critical Thresholds and Tipping Points for Priority Coastal Species in a Changing Future The U.S. Inland Creel and Angler Survey Catalog (CreelCat): A Database and Interactive Tool for Inland Fisheries Management and Research Making an Invisible Resource Visible: Integrating Inland Fisheries into the Sustainable Development Goals One from Many: Combining State Creel Data to Estimate Regional Harvest Understanding Brook Trout Persistence in Warming Streams A Climate Risk Management Screening and Assessment Review for Madagascar’s Country Development Cooperation Strategy Putting the Sampling Design to Work: Enhancing Species Monitoring Programs in the Face of Climate Change Future Aquatic Invaders of the Northeast U.S.: How Climate Change, Human Vectors, and Natural History Could Bring Southern and Western Species North Climate-Adaptive Population Supplementation (CAPS) to Enhance Fishery and Forestry Outcomes Southeast Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Management Network (SE RISCC) Understanding Brook Trout Persistence in Warming Streams Climate Change and Resilience of Sport Fisheries in Lakes Climate-Adaptive Population Supplementation (CAPS) to Enhance Fishery and Forestry Outcomes Projected Climate Change Impacts on Stream Dwelling Smallmouth Bass Populations in the U.S. (Local Assessment) Implications of Future Shifts in Migration, Spawning, and Other Life Events of Coastal Fish and Wildlife Species A Climate Risk Management Screening and Assessment Review for Madagascar’s Country Development Cooperation Strategy Projected Vulnerability of Brook Trout to Climate and Land Use Changes in the Eastern U.S. (Regional Assessment) One from Many: Combining State Creel Data to Estimate Regional Harvest Southeast Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Management Network (SE RISCC) USGS-USFS Partnership to Help Managers Evaluate Conservation Strategies for Aquatic Ecosystems Based on Future Climate Projections Putting the Sampling Design to Work: Enhancing Species Monitoring Programs in the Face of Climate Change Future Aquatic Invaders of the Northeast U.S.: How Climate Change, Human Vectors, and Natural History Could Bring Southern and Western Species North The Impacts of Drought on Fish and Wildlife in the Southwestern U.S. Identifying Critical Thresholds and Tipping Points for Priority Coastal Species in a Changing Future State of the Science on the Effects of Climate Change on North American Inland Fishes The U.S. Inland Creel and Angler Survey Catalog (CreelCat): A Database and Interactive Tool for Inland Fisheries Management and Research A Value and Investment Assessment of Marine and Inland Fisheries Globally to Inform Future Resource Management Strategies Fish and Climate Change (FiCli) Database: Informing Climate Change Adaptation and Management Actions for Freshwater Fishes Global Analysis of Trends in Projected and Documented Effects of Climate Change on Inland Fish Making an Invisible Resource Visible: Integrating Inland Fisheries into the Sustainable Development Goals