Identifying Thermal Refugia for Brook Trout Climate Adaptation in Coldwater Streams

Climate change is making coldwater stream fish and their habitats more vulnerable than ever. In the Midwest, warming stream temperatures threaten recreational fishing for brook trout in their native range around the Great Lakes. To ensure that brook trout populations will persist into the future, it is crucial to focus management on areas where brook trout populations are most resilient, and to conduct landscape-level management to increase their resiliency. Resilient coldwater streams have thermal refugia areas where stream temperatures stay colder thanks to influxes of cold water from other water sources, such as groundwater. Existing methods to identify these thermal refugia have relied on either thermal gauges, which are better [...]