FisHab Project.Toward new ecosystem indicators of fish habitat in Canadian inland waters in a climate change and multiple stressor context.
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Research Priorities
This collaborative project builds on research done by GRIL members and by the NSERC LakePulse Network to develop new ecosystem indicators, improve reporting tools and to better describe multiple stressors affecting freshwater fish habitats. Environmental and lower food web data will be provided by the LakePulse Network for lakes across Canada, and by other partners and GRIL researchers for an expanded focus on Quebec waterways. These data will be complemented by fish data from GRIL researchers and other partners (government, NGOs, public and private sources) and assembled by the FisHab project to improve understanding of aquatic food webs. We plan to use the new ecosystem indicators developed in FisHab in conjunction with climate change scenarios to predict the future distribution of fish habitat in Quebec. This research will address knowledge gaps in the links between fish biodiversity, fish habitats, and various physical and biological characteristics of inland waters. It will also help identify potential species or habitats to be monitored with greater vigilance.
OBJECTIVE 01
Large-scale synthesis of
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OBJECTIVE 02
New Multivariate Ecosystem IndicatorsFollowing this large-scale synthesis of data, we will be able to work towards developing new integrated estimates or indicators of ecosystem factors that are related to particular stocks of fish or to their community composition. We will use cutting-edge methods in multivariate statistics to identify relations between fish species and their communities to environmental and biotic factors across fish habitats.
We will also use the database to assess habitats, regions, and fish species that are particularly at risk, thereby identifying priorities for conservation actions.
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OBJECTIVE 03
Projection under Climate ChangeWe will use the developed new ecosystem indicators that will include climatically-driven variables in conjunction with climate change scenarios to predict future distributions of fish habitat and community distributions across Québec. Modelled predictions for climate factor shifts (e.g. precipitation, temperature, water levels, solar radiation) will be done over a 50-year timeframe for regions of Quebec where the database has the most suitable coverage.
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