Seeing the Forest Service Beyond the Trees

Fishy Fridays

Weekly spotlight on fisheries science journal articles

 

Jeff Kopaska
AFS Executive Director
jkopaska@fisheries.org

I am working to complete the last of my self-assigned tasks prior to enjoying a holiday tomorrow, and Fishy Friday is about the last item on my list. Last week, I was in Washington, D.C., representing AFS to a number of Congressional staffers, and meeting with fisheries folks from a variety of federal agencies. I had an outstanding meeting with Nat Gillespie from the US Forest Service, and I learned much about the significant partnership that AFS and USFS have had for decades. Nat reminded me of the September 2018 special issue of Fisheries that highlighted USFS fisheries staff and accomplishments, that entire issue is excellent. I look forward to meeting with USFS Chief Tom Schultz later in July to talk about AFS and USFS fisheries issues and opportunities.

Did you know that more than 220,000 miles of rivers and streams, and over 10 million acres of lakes, reservoirs and ponds are on national forests and grasslands?

Today’s paper is from the May issue of NAJFM, and is another great USFS product (it’s not just trees!). The take home for me was, how to use big data (the National Hydrography Dataset) and geospatial tools and modeling to better understand aquatic habitats and species distributions. They also employed eDNA sampling to verify species presence in some areas where sampling had not occurred recently. The authors had good suggestions about how to modify the data to better suit the research needs, as the dataset was not created with fisheries applications in mind. My favorite line in the article was the first line of the conclusion – “The famous quote, ‘All models are wrong, some are useful’ by the statistician George Box seems apropos of NHD stream networks.”

The importance of trimming National Hydrography Dataset streamline networks when delineating potential habitats and species distributions for fish and amphibians in broad geographical applications