National Stream Fish Passage Barrier Inventory: Connecting Fragmented Data

There is a growing focus on landscape-scale efforts to quantify, assess, and prioritize management of potential in-stream fish passage barriers.  The task of developing fish passage inventories is time intensive and often limited to compiling publicly available data.  The accessibility, data structure, and incompleteness of existing aggregated data often constrain database development and passage analyses.  To address  the growing demand for standardized fish passage data the USGS Aquatic Gap Analysis Program (AGAP) researched recent and ongoing fish passage data compilation efforts to characterize the regional similarities and differences in data needs and data availability.  AGAP is using results from the analysis along with literature to develop a nationally consistent framework that can be used to help build, standardize, maintain and distribute a publicly available dataset of fish passage barriers.  This framework will be structured to contain an array of physical barrier and site descriptions that were found to be useful to researchers and managers for the analyses of barrier passability by fish.  Ongoing efforts are being coordinated to support implementation of this framework which will help expand accessibility and usefulness of existing data and allow future research to advance data collection and synthesis efforts.