Improving Opportunities for Large-Scale Fish Habitat Conservation: Data Developed in Support of the National Fish Habitat Action Plan

Increasingly, consistent, comparable data available over large regions are required to support decision-making about where and how to allocate limited resources.  In 2010, our team released a large-scale data set to inform efforts related to protecting and restoring fish habitat for the National Fish Habitat Action Plan (NFHAP).  These data were originally compiled for a condition assessment of the Nation’s rivers completed in 2010, and their public release was intended to support NFHAP Partnerships and others performing regional work.  These data include landscape-scale variables characterizing land use, land cover, and anthropogenic disturbances like dams and road crossings.  Yet while these variables come from public sources, the utility of our database is that variables are linked to a hierarchical spatial framework providing information at multiple spatial scales.  For the conterminous U.S. and Hawaii, our base spatial unit is the river reach, and data for these regions are available in local catchments of reaches, ecoregions, HUCs, and at state-wide scales.  For Alaska, we use HUC-12s as the base unit, and data are available in larger HUCs and ecoregions.  Data are available on a USGS-sponsored web site, http://ecosystems.usgs.gov/fishhabitat, and to our knowledge, represent the largest publically available database characterizing disturbances to U.S. rivers.