Alaska and Hawaii Fish Habitat Partnerships: Overview and Evaluation of Methods for Assessment and Prioritization

The seventeen new Fish Habitat Partnerships (FHP) organized under the 2006 National Fish Habitat Action Plan face many shared challenges in meeting the goals of NFHAP and implementing their Strategic Plans for regional fish habitat conservation.  Among these is the need to target limited partnership resources where they will have the greatest impact, and to assess progress, protecting, restoring and enhancing fish habitat. This presentation will summarize habitat assessment frameworks currently being used by FHPs in the inland waters of Alaska and Hawaii and will describe future needs and refinements that will support strategic and effective conservation decisions.  FHP assessment frameworks will also be contrasted with the National framework.

Fish Habitat Partnerships within Alaska include the Matanuska-Susitna Basin Salmon Habitat Partnership, the Kenai Peninsula Fish Habitat Partnership, and the Southwest Alaska Salmon Habitat Partnership.  FHPs in the relatively more developed parts of Southcentral Alaska, both the Matanuska-Susitna Basin and Kenai Peninsula FHPs use a GIS-based watershed atlas that incorporate stressors to fish habitat such as road density, culvert barriers, land use, invasive fish, and water quality. In the case of the Matanuska-Susitna Basin FHP, salmon species and life stage distribution from Alaska’s Anadromous Waters Catalog geodatabase is included to allow consideration of biological value together with threat in determining geographic priorities for conservation actions.  In relatively undeveloped Southwestern Alaska, threats are largely due to potential land development in riparian corridors associated with highly productive salmon habitats.  The Southwest Alaska FHP uses GIS layers including land conservation status, mining claims, proposed roads, and oil and gas leases to identify watersheds having higher levels of potential threat.  Conservation actions are then focused on these watersheds.

The Hawaii Fish Habitat Partnership uses three data sources to strategically develop and implement conservation projects in inland Waters.  These include: the Hawaii portion of the National Assessment of Fish Habitat, the Atlas of Hawaiian Watersheds and their Aquatic Species, and the Hawaii Statewide Fish Passage Barriers Inventory. The Hawaii and Alaska portions of the National Assessment were completed separately from the conterminous Unites States because of differences in scale and data availability. The Hawaii Stream Atlas describes each watershed’s physical information, streams and reaches, sampling effort, species observed, stream status, and watershed threats. The barriers database, currently in development with Hawaii FHP funding, will compile existing and new information into a GIS that contains locations and types of barriers to migratory fish and invertebrate passage.