Combining demographic and genetic factors to assess population vulnerability in stream species

Abstract: Accelerating climate change and other cumulative stressors create an urgent need to understand the influence of environmental variation and landscape features on the connectivity and vulnerability of freshwater species. Here, we introduce a novel modeling framework for aquatic systems that integrates spatially-explicit, individual-based, demographic and genetic (demogenetic) assessments with environmental variables. To show its potential utility, we simulated a hypothetical network of 19 migratory riverine populations (e.g., salmonids) using a riverscape connectivity and demogenetic model (CDFISH). We assessed how stream resistance to movement -- a function of water temperature, fluvial distance, and...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Connectivity, Dispersal, Fish, Gene flow, Genetic diversity, All tags... Northwest CASC, Rivers, Streams and Lakes, Salvelinus confluentus, Vulnerability Assessments, Water, Coasts and Ice, Wildlife and Plants, genetic differentiation, landscape genetics, population viability, risk maps, stream barrier, stream networks, Fewer tags