1 Big Picture

Big picture here is to build evidence based approach to the parameters used to model the best habitat for individual fish species to help make decisions around where to invest in aquatic restoration activities (along with lots of others factors of course). As higher fish densities sampled can be a good indicator of high value habitats, we will describe the relationships between fish density and measured as well as remotely sensed habitat/barrier characteristics. bcfishpass is a key piece of this puzzle and will except habitat parameters that allow us to model the quantity and quality of potential spawning and rearing habitat upstream of defined locations.

Using the electrofishing data from British Columbia databases (supplied by Robin Munro and Craig Mount from the BC Ministry of Environment) this work intends to tie fish density to habitat characteristics. Gradient is available in the freshwater atlas, and discharge data is available for some watersheds from PCIC. We are developing methods to estimate channel width using Bayesian modelling of watershed size, precipitation and potentially other factors. We hope to step back to using parameters that have fed the PCIC discharge data to build discharge estimates raw when time and funding allows.

Joe Thorley had a great point when he said that though we are starting with BC data we will keep our minds open to ways of bringing in datasets from elsewhere in the world in the long term.

Through this work and numerous other initiatives Simon Norris has been evolving fwapg. fwapg is leveraged with fwapgr to provide an R Client to the database and expand the tool’s functionality. To gather stream segment and watershed characteristics related to the electrofishing density points that were shared with us by the province these tools are expanding the information in the dataset. The resulting outputs are constantly evolving with initial versions undergoing defensible magic in fissr-explore-21b.

Watersheds geojson here. Scripts to clean up the data pulled from the province are here and scripts to tie this tidied data to measured as well as remotely sensed habitat characteristics are here.

Recently we have come across this EAUBC Rivers dataset. EAU BC is a hierarchical classification of BC’s freshwater ecosystems. EAUBC Rivers (WHSE_LAND_AND_NATURAL_RESOURCE.EAUBC_RIVERS_SP) is a spatial layer representing River and Lake Ecosystem Types nested within both Ecological Drainage Units and Freshwater Ecoregions. Seems like a great resource and the source code to create it must be an absolute jackpot.