Multi-Scale Fish and Habitat Tools for the Great Lakes and Beyond

Understanding and predicting the effects of ecological change and management actions are difficult, because many organisms, habitat conditions, and their interactions are involved at multiple scales over large areas. Most organisms do not respect political boundaries and many have wider spatial ranges than the jurisdictional boundaries of agencies that deal with them. The Great Lakes Regional Aquatic Gap Analysis Project, with the assistance of several state and federal agencies, has developed data and tools that help us better examine and analyze ecological conditions over a broad range of spatial scales. The main project tasks were to, 1) gather and organize georeferenced fish and habitat data throughout the US Great Lakes basin and adjacent portions of New York and Wisconsin, 2) develop predictive models of species-habitat relationships and estimate abundances throughout the region, and 3) provide a hydrology-guided habitat classification system (for both the Great Lakes and surrounding drainages) and other tools to examine biotic and habitat distributions from the stream reach to the basin-wide scale. A wide range of assessment capabilities are now available. We present several example applications, including predicted distributions of brook trout, stream water temperature, fish biodiversity, and flow response models in support of management priorities.