A Watershed Approach to Fish Community Conservation: Diadromous Fish Conservation Areas on the Atlantic Coast

Streams and rivers along the Atlantic Coast have been impacted by human activities such as dam building, water quality impairment, and sedimentation for centuries.  As a result, the suite of diadromous fish species that use them for spawning and rearing habitat, and that require access to the ocean, have declined in distribution and abundance.  We used data on current distributions, historical distributions, and run counts for twelve diadromous fishes and coupled it with information on habitat conditions and future threats in a spatial planning framework to rank subwatersheds from Virginia to Maine based on their conservation value for diadromous fishes.  Subwatershed rankings were used in a stakeholder-informed process to identify watershed-scale areas that can potentially serve as Diadromous Fish Conservation Areas (DFCAs) where management can benefit the entire diadromous fish community.  Focusing restoration in watersheds where it has the potential to benefit a wider array of aquatic biodiversity has many advantages over traditional species-by-species conservation efforts.