​Summary

This analysis package summarize and visualize the National Fish Habitat Partnership's (NFHP) National Inland Assessment of Fish Habitats (2015) to ecological and jurisdictional boundaries that may be relevant to conservation decisions (e.g. National Park Boundaries, Hydrological Units, States).

Often biologists, park managers and other decision makers are confronted with the need to prioritize funding for conservation and restoration efforts with limited resources and information to make decisions. These summaries of NFHP data are intended to give decisionmakers an additional set of information helping to better understand implications of fish habitat condition within their jurisdiction and the adjacent landscape. Specifically, this information can help inform decisionmakers of applicable disturbances at appropriate spatial scales when making decisions about fish habitat.

For smaller spatial units and jurisdictions, managers are likely to be aware of specific disturbances and associated issues with fish habitat, but landscape level influences may be less intuitive and harder to quantify. The summaries and identification of disturbances calculated from a set of dynamic input data provide a quick overview of disturbances and spatial scales (e.g. especially network disturbances) to further investigate through exploring catchment level information (i.e. habitat condition scores, significant disturbance metrics, and disturbance summaries) and other finer resolution sources of information that may be available.

In cases where several ecological units are within a larger jurisdiction a decisionmaker can quickly compare overall risk of fish habitat degredation and influencing disturbances. These findings can be further investigated by exploring catchment level information from the National Fish Habitat Partnership (i.e. habitat condition scores, significant disturbance metrics, and disturbance summaries) and other finer resolution sources of information that may be available.