Use of Socioeconomic Data in Conservation Decisions about Fish Habitat Partnerships

Since 2006, state, federal and tribal governments and their conservation partners have been working together across the Midwest and Great Plains to develop Fish Habitat Partnerships (FHP) under the National Fish Habitat Partnership (formerly known as the National Fish Habitat Action Plan).  In 2009, six FHP’s jointly undertook the task of assessing aquatic habitat condition by modeling cumulative impacts of primarily terrestrially based anthropogenic stressors in stream and lake catchments.  While much progress has been made in understand the biological impacts of these stressors, little effort has been made to understand the social and economic aspects of the anthropogenic stressors causing the impacts.  New data collection efforts to gather social and economic information on a broadscale are prohibitively costly and time consuming.  I identify and review existing socio-economic data that could be integrated into ongoing modeling efforts as well as suggest new approaches such agent based modeling that could be used to help anticipate dynamic, anthropogenic threats to fisheries habitats.