Integration of juvenile habitat quality and river connectivity models to understand and prioritise the management of barriers for Atlantic salmon populations across spatial scales

Diadromous fish populations are strongly affected by in-stream barriers that cause river network fragmentation, constraining productivity or preventing completion of their lifecycle. Removal or reduction of barrier impacts is a restoration measure associated with unambiguous benefits. Management of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Science of the total environment 2019-03, Vol.655, p.557-566
Main Authors: Buddendorf, Willem B., Jackson, Faye L., Malcolm, Iain A., Millidine, Karen J., Geris, Josie, Wilkinson, Mark E., Soulsby, Chris
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Barrier prioritisation
Barriers to migration
Habitat quality
Restoration
River connectivity
Scalable
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Summary:Diadromous fish populations are strongly affected by in-stream barriers that cause river network fragmentation, constraining productivity or preventing completion of their lifecycle. Removal or reduction of barrier impacts is a restoration measure associated with unambiguous benefits. Management of barriers is therefore often prioritised above other restoration actions. Barrier management is prioritised at local and national scales depending on funding. However, barrier prioritisation is potentially sub-optimal because existing tools do not consider habitat quality. Furthermore, effects of partial barriers (those passable under certain conditions) are uncertain, depending on location and potential cumulative effects. A framework is presented for assessing effects of impassable manmade barriers (IMBs) on longitudinal river network connectivity (percentage of upstream habitat accessible from the river mouth) for Atlantic salmon across spatial scales, using Scotland as an example. The framework integrates juvenile habitat quality and network connectivity models to (1) provide information necessary for local and national prioritisation of barriers, and (2) assess potential effects of passable manmade barriers (PMBs) within a sensitivity framework. If only IMBs are considered, high levels of longitudinal connectivity are observed across most of Scotland's rivers. Barrier prioritisation is sensitive to habitat weighting: not accounting for habitat quality can lead to over- or underestimating the importance of IMBs. Prioritisation is also highly sensitive to the passability of PMBs: if passability drops to
ISSN:0048-9697
1879-1026
DOI:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.11.263