GIS-Based Modeling Assists Fishers & Farmers Partnership with Strategic Habitat Conservation

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service contracted Downstream Strategies, a GIS based consulting firm, to conduct a habitat condition assessment for the Fishers & Farmers Partnership for the Upper Mississippi River Basin and for five other Midwestern National Fish Habitat Partnerships.  An assessment was conducted to help the Fishers & Farmers Partnership better understand current fish habitat conditions within the Upper Mississippi River Basin, which includes large parts of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. The Upper Mississippi River Basin includes about 30,700 miles of streams, and over 60% of the land area is used as agricultural cropland (primarily corn and soybeans) or pasture.  The assessment will help the Fishers & Farmers Partnership understand how natural landscape characteristics and anthropogenic stressors relate to fish species richness and presence in streams and rivers across the Upper Mississippi River Basin. Predictions for fish species presence were made at the 1:100k stream catchment scale. Model assessments prioritized areas for protection where stress was low and natural habitat quality was high. For fish species richness, protection areas included higher-order streams and rivers across the basin. Model assessments prioritized areas for restoration where stress and natural habitat quality were high. For fish species richness, restoration areas were focused in the central part of the basin, primarily in Illinois.  In addition to fish species richness, we will discuss model assessments for four individual fish species (blacknose shiner, brook silverside, golden shiner, and smallmouth bass).  These assessments will be used by the Fishers & Farmers Partnership to help prioritize partnership projects to protect or restore aquatic habitat in agricultural areas across the Upper Mississippi River Basin.