Webinar – August 23 – Chinook Salmon Redds

What Can a Long-Term Chinook Salmon Redd Survey Tell Us about Habitat Quality and Climate Change in a Dynamic Mountain Wilderness Landscape?

Monday, August 23, 2021
1:00 pm Eastern Time
Register Now!

Presenter:
Greg Jacobs
Cornell University
Department of Natural Resources and the Environment

Description:
Pacific salmon spawning and rearing habitats result from dynamic interactions among geomorphic processes, natural disturbances, and hydro-climatological factors. The effects of these variables on salmon habitat are well established in isolation, but their relative importance and joint effects in driving variation in spawning habitat quality at the landscape scale are less well-established. Here, we couple a familiar probabilistic species distribution model (logistic regression) with a 21-year record of redd locations in a wilderness river network in central Idaho, USA, to examine Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) spawning occurrence and how a changing climate might affect habitat. First, this webinar will discuss how we quantified geomorphic characteristics, climatic factors, wildfire, and conspecific abundance throughout the network, and how we then built and evaluated our model to predict redd occurrence probability based on landscape environmental variables. Second, this webinar will present our assessment of (a) how well our model predicts new data collected in subsequent years and (b) what our model indicates for the future of Chinook salmon habitat in in our system.