Pushing habitat into the future: An overview of the science basis of the national fish habitat action plan

The National Fish Habitat Action Plan (NFHAP) is a voluntary science-based effort to protect, rehabilitate and improve the nation’s aquatic habitat.  A key component of the science basis is a 2010 national assessment of the nation’s fish habitat, eventually extending from the mountains to the shelf.  The assessment will focus on ecosystem process impairments, summarize large amounts of system data to support prioritization decisions and measure plan success, and allow lessons learned to be applied between similar systems.  All of the nation’s waters will be classified using published classification systems including the WWF’s Aquatic Zoogeography Units, TNCs Ecological Drainage Units, and NOAA’s Coastal and Estuarine Drainage Areas.  Inland waters will use the NHD+ as their data structure.  Condition analysis will focus on six emergent processes: hydrology, bottom and channel form to include living habitat (i.e. coral reefs), material recruitment, connectivity, water quality, and energy flow.   Both the inland and coastal assessments will use surrogate variables from national datasets taken in a consistent fashion and meaningful to structuring fish habitat.  Future assessments will use detailed process related variables and will examine if systems are within 25% of the expected natural variability for each process variable, a scaleless analysis.