Assessing benefits of agricultural best management practices to fish communities across MI and WI through integration of multiple geospatial datasets and physicochemical models

Conservation practitioners often struggle with freshwater restoration projects in the agricultural Midwest because there is a lack of empirical information and tools to specifically identify which conservation actions are most needed and how much conservation is necessary to achieve desired fish community conditions.  Fortunately, significant improvements in geospatial technologies and modeling capabilities, like the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), coupled with the increasing availability of key geospatial datasets have provided scientists with the opportunity to fill these critical knowledge gaps and develop accurate predictive models and tools for guiding conservation actions. Capitalizing on these opportunities, the goal of this project to develop spatially-explicit models of stream health, based on fish community condition, across lower MI and WI to specifically help, a) managers develop realistic biologically-based conservation goals, and b) predict and map the potential benefits of BMP scenarios to fish communities.  This presentation will cover the conceptual, analytical, and geospatial modeling steps being used to address these objectives and discuss the relevance of the various landscape scale input datasets and decision tool outputs that will be provided to managers.