Scaling up – the Midwest Regional Assessment

One of the greatest challenges we face in landscape conservation of aquatic species is the issue of scale, both spatial and temporal.  All conservation is local but planning for conservation occurs at any and every scale.  In 2010, The National Fish Habitat Action Plan released, Through a Fish's Eye: The Status of Fish Habitat in the United States 2010 Report.  This ground-breaking report looks at aquatic habitat on a national spatial scale which inherently limits its applicability to making catchment scale decisions.  Fish Habitat Partnerships (FHP) were charged with conducting their own habitat assessments using regionally available data to bridge the data gap between national and local.  The five FHPs of the Midwest completed these assessments in August 2012 allowing for a more detailed look at the accumulation of human impacts on streams and lakes locally.  As part of this effort, the FHPs wanted to take a look at similar data across the collection of 5 FHPs.  This Midwest Regional Assessment includes new models with regionally consistent coldwater, coolwater, and warmwater endpoints, assessing all aquatic stream habitats in the Midwest FHPs ranging from first order streams to large rivers.  This assessment includes a consistent calculation of anthropogenic stress and natural habitat quality based on sensitivity analysis, automatically incorporating interactions and managing variable redundancies, which is a recognized limitation of the current methodology used by the FHPs.