To facilitate delivery conservation planning and implementation in the Native Fish Conservation Areas network, webinars and workshops are conducted within the various networks.
These workshops have been and will continue to be used to identify priority conservation actions to conserve native fishes and identify related science needs that must be addressed to help prioritize, guide, and evaluate these conservation actions. Additionally, the workshops are used to facilitate a dialogue among local stakeholders regarding the potential development of local alliances interested in implementing coordinated watershed-scale conservation actions to benefit watershed health.
The process of facilitating cooperative planning and collaborative conservation involves three major components:
Group of local resource management experts charged with fulfilling the vision for NFCAs within their designated watershed.
Roles and Responsibilities include:
- Identify priority research, monitoring, and restoration actions for preservation of native fishes, their habitats and other aquatic resources.
- Serve as a catalyst for cooperation, collaboration, and leveraging of technical and financial resources among local, state and federal natural resources management agencies, universities, non-governmental organizations, and other local partners that contribute to the conservation of native fishes and other aquatic resources.
- Facilitate local implementation of the National Fish Habitat Action Plan and State Wildlife Action Plans.
Designed to facilitate the roles and responsibilities of the advisory council and ensure equal attention to all NFCAs that result in protecting imperiled taxa throughout the NFCA networks. It is a management framework and common spatial language for applying and communicating project-level actions and thematic conservation issues. We leverage the spatial prioritization analyses performed by Labay and Hendrickson (2014), and which includes these major spatial management tiers (adapted from Abell et. al., 2007).
I. Watershed Management Zones: the major river basins that occur within the area of interest provide a geopolitical framework with which to start. NFCAs are recognized and distinguished within these large units. Within watershed management zones, basic practices would include maintenance of riparian buffers, restricting activities on steep slopes, treating wastewater, restricting pesticides and fertilizers, and prohibitions against exotic species.
II. Native Fish Conservation Areas: are defined by the spatial planning process outlined in Labay and Hendrickson 2014, and briefly, are determined by the distance and compositional similarity of priority streams identified in that assessment. These areas can be described as those places whose management is essential to maintaining functionality of habitat complexity and priority taxa (Williams et al. 2011). The initial set of NFCAs determined by the assessment are intended to be augmented by the advisory council as needed.
III. Subwatersheds: a geopolitical unit used to break up working groups into smaller sections.
The NFCA-based advisory councils are tasked with providing spatially-explicit guidance and suggested project-level ideas for each of the 9 objectives, which include:
- Determine locations and extent of healthy habitats.
- Assess degree of threats and limiting factors present in healthy habitats.
- Develop a priority list of stream segments for protection actions.
- Organize Technical Advisory Teams for individual stream segments to analyze current data, define challenges, determine conservation methods and engage public support.
- Develop action plans for addressing the objectives, select the best watershed management alternatives, list strategies for implementing alternatives and determine appropriate milestones for measuring progress.
- Maintain floodplain functions such as aquifer recharge, natural flow regime, base flows, spring flows, water quality, soil moistening, habitat diversity and sediment transport.
- Maintain appropriate sediment transport.
- Maintain native vegetation throughout stream segments, including riparian corridors, floodplains and upland areas.
- Develop voluntary, non-regulatory tools such as financial incentives, conservation easements, landowner agreements and targeted acquisition.
- Seek appropriate easements, water rights acquisitions and flow agreements to maintain appropriate hydrologic conditions.
- Adopt conservation approaches that are cost-effective and sustainable over time.
- Convene stakeholder groups to foster support of action plans.
- Monitor conservation efforts and assess benefits to focal species populations.
- Determine locations, extent and type of impacted habitats.
- Assess degree of threats and limiting factors present in impacted habitats.
- Develop a priority list of stream segments for restoration actions.
- Organize Technical Advisory Teams for individual stream segments to analyze data, define challenges, determine restoration methods and engage public support.
- Develop action plans for addressing the objectives, select the best watershed management alternatives, list strategies for implementing alternatives and determine appropriate milestones for measuring progress.
- Where feasible, restore floodplain functions such as aquifer recharge, natural flow regime, base flows, spring flows, water quality, soil moistening, habitat diversity and sediment transport.
- Restore appropriate sediment transport.
- Restore native vegetation throughout stream segments, including riparian corridors, floodplains and upland areas.
- Develop voluntary, non-regulatory tools such as financial incentives, conservation easements, landowner agreements and targeted acquisition.
- Seek appropriate easements, water rights acquisitions and flow agreements to improve appropriate hydrologic conditions.
- Adopt conservation approaches that are cost-effective and sustainable over time.
- Convene stakeholder groups to foster support of action plans.
- Monitor restoration efforts and assess benefits to focal species populations.
- Inventory fish passage barriers and delineate impacts on ecology of focal species.
- Where feasible, diminish or remove fish passage barriers and restore aquatic connectivity
- Assess current status of focal species affected by invasive species.
- Develop methods for reducing abundance of non-native species in targeted areas.
- Develop methods to prevent introductions of non-native species and minimize impacts of existing invasive species.
- Restore or improve the ecological balance in habitats negatively affected by non-native, invasive or problem species.
- Reestablish genetic integrity of hybridized populations in targeted areas.
- Provide technical guidance workshops, newsletters, social media, etc. to facilitate development and expansion of local citizen-based partnerships.
- Landowner networks should be committed to the cooperative conservation of land and water resources within the watershed.
- Landowner networks should promote values of functional upland, riparian, and stream systems and emphasize the conservation of native fish communities and supporting habitats.
- Landowner networks should work to reduce or eliminate activities on the landscape that degrade water quality, reduce water quantity, degrade riparian systems, favor non-native species or fragment stream systems.
- Landowner networks should encourage an array of sustainable land-use activities that are compatible with aquatic resource conservation.
- Landowner networks should promote collaboration across jurisdictional and land ownership boundaries.
- Provide nature-oriented recreation opportunities (e.g., fishing, paddling, hiking, wildlife viewing).
- Promote sustainable public use of rivers.
- Demonstrate best management practices.
- Highlight restoration actions through educational kiosks.
- Identify knowledge gaps critical to restoration and conservation of the focal species.
- Design and conduct research as needed to enhance conservation efforts outlined in Objectives 1-4.
- Initial sampling at representative locations within each NFCA should be quarterly and include:
- Biological characteristics of focal species: population size, population structure (genetics & demographics), fecundity, food habits, habitat selectivity, flow-ecology relationships and associated species.
- Habitat structure: flow and discharge rates, channel width, channel morphology, substrate types, depth, cover and trends in surrounding land use.
- Water quality: temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, total dissolved solids, alkalinity, hardness, chemical and biological oxygen demand.
- Determine research needs for refining restoration and management actions.
- Threats and limiting factors for the focal species will determine the scale at which the monitoring is designed. As baseline data are developed, monitoring parameters can be modified and streamlined to address critical issues and needs for the focal species.
- Periodically modify strategies based on monitoring, evaluation and research results.
- Develop annual and long-term reporting requirements to document acquired data, departures from plan and evaluations necessary for adaptive management.
- Share information with stakeholders, streamline processes and seek creative programs that support voluntary conservation actions.
- Share information with the public in an easy to use and understandable format.
- Improve coordination and delivery of incentives programs to more effectively serve landowners and more strategically address needs of focal species and habitats.
- Improve data management, coordination and sharing between various conservation partners to support voluntary conservation.
- Expand technical assistance and delivery of services to landowners through outreach and stakeholder involvement.