Flowing Forward: A View to the Future for the Direction of the National Fish Habitat Assessment

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 the periodic assessment of the nation’s fish habitat, eventually extending from the mountains to the shelf.  The assessment focuses on ecosystem process impairments, summarizing large amounts of system data to support Board and Partnership decisions on where to focus efforts, measure plan success, and allow lessons learned to be applied between similar systems.  The system is designed for information input from any spatial scale, and allows for both vertical (aggregating habitat condition scores) and horizontal (comparisons between systems using system classification) fish habitat condition analysis.  Condition analysis will focus on six emergent processes that control fish habitat: hydrology, bottom and channel form to include living habitat (i.e. submerged aquatic vegetation and mussel shoals), material recruitment, connectivity, water quality, and energy flow.   The 2010 National Fish Habitat Assessment used surrogate variables from national datasets taken in a consistent fashion and meaningful to structuring fish habitat as these were the only meaningful national data available.  All future assessments will use detailed process related variables from Fish Habitat Partnership habitat assessments and other data sources.  The goal will be to examine if systems are within the expected natural variability for each process variable, a scale-less analysis that can be done at any spatial unit, to determine their level of impairment.  Future assessments will also develop transfer functions to allow 2010 landscape level assessment data to be compared with detailed process variables to allow seamless comparisons between time periods.