Long-Term Fish Monitoring and Assessment: Landscape Level Comparisons within and between River Basins Provides Context to Natural Resource Management Strategies Part 1

Large river systems traverse multiple jurisdictions and have many stakeholders, each with specific interests and management needs. Natural resource management goals range from conservation of native, threatened, or endangered species, control and mitigation of invasive species, to assessing the effects of water management policies, or assessing the response of aquatic biota to habitat restoration and mitigation efforts. This can make it difficult to establish a common framework for collecting data needed to inform management within a river system, but especially across multiple systems. However, despite disparate natural resource management goals, long-term fish monitoring programs often produce similar types of fisheries data. While similar types of data can arise from long-term fish monitoring programs, how the data are used to address management priorities can vary widely. Experts from across the US will discuss commonalities in the collection and application of fisheries data across river basins, share information about how these data are used to address natural resource management issues, and present information that describes within and between river basin trends in fish communities  at regional and continental scales. The symposium will focus on underlying commonalities in fish populations and communities among these rivers and suggest characteristics of fish monitoring programs that provide data most useful for conducting cross-system analyses.