Fish Habitat: Essential Fish Habitat and Rehabilitation

Part Four: Nonfishing Impacts on Fish Habitat

Robert R. Stickney

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781888569124.ch17

It only takes a small amount of thought to come up with an extensive list of nonfishing impacts on fish habitat. My “off-the-top-of-the-head” list includes point and nonpoint source pollution, noxious algal blooms, exotic species invasions, dredging and filling projects, global climate variation, storm activity, wetland restoration, artificial-reef-building projects, tectonic events, boating activity, and mining projects. I immediately added war to my list because bombs and torpedoes can have an ugly impact on ecosystems. Many of the preceding impacts are negative. At least two of the preceding impacts, wetland restoration and artificialreef- building projects, can be very positive. And at least one of the impacts, war, can have both positive and negative effects.

This particular part of the symposium took both the broad and narrow view but overall considered many of the possible nonfishing impacts on fish habitat. A presentation at the American Fisheries Society’s (AFS’s) August 1998 Annual Meeting in Hartford, Connecticut by Bob Francis (not included in this volume) on interdecadal climate variations in the North Pacific on various fish species distribution patterns took into consideration a big chunk of the world’s marine environment. Taking a narrower view are discussions in the following chapters of the restoration of portions of the extensive Louisiana wetlands by R. Glenn Thomas and of community involvement with agencies to help restore an Oregon watershed by Paul Heikkila. Focusing even further, J. Stanley Cobb et al. describe the impacts of an oil spill on a New England lobster community.

One of the items that should have made my list of nonfishing impacts but did not was land-use practices. That topic, with respect to forestry, is covered by Nina Kelly et al. Finally, a chapter by Anthony Wilbur and Michael Pentony, based on a poster presentation at the AFS meeting, provides a compilation of various human activities that can impact fish habitat. Again, Wilbur and Pentony’s chapter contains items that I had not considered.

These chapters demonstrate not only some different approaches to habitat research but also the potential for successful outreach program development to engage the public in habitat issues. There seems to have been at least one consensus arising from the symposium in Hartford: the public will need to become engaged if the goal of taking habitat into consideration in the management of our fisheries is to be attained. Everyone has a stake in maintaining or improving habitat. One of our challenges now is to make the public aware of that fact.