Modified items

All recently modified items, latest first.

Map of Listed, Proposed, and Candidate Fish in the UTRB: Map depicting the number of listed, proposed, and candidate fish species within each 12-digit HUC within the Upper Tennessee River Basin. Occurrences include extant and historical records. Areas within the UTRB boundary not shaded by a color denoted in the key have no records of imperiled fish species occurrences.

Map of Federally Listed Species within the UTRB in Tennessee: Map of Listed and candidate aquatic species in the Upper Tennessee hydrologic sub-unit of Tennessee.

Map of Federally Listed Aquatic Species in Virginia Portion of UTRB: Map depicting listed and candidate aquatic species in the Upper Tennessee hydrologic sub-unit of Virginia.

Fact Sheet: Riparian Restoration Decision Support Tool: An innovative web-based tool - funded by the Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) and developed by researchers from the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Massachusetts - is allowing managers to rapidly identify high-priority riparian targets for restoration to make more resilient in preparation for changes in future climate. The Riparian Restoration Prioritization to Promote Climate Change Resilience (RPCCR) tool identifies vulnerable stream and riverbanks that lack tree cover and shade in coldwater stream habitats. By locating the best spots to plant trees in riparian zones, resource managers can provide shade that limits the amount of solar radiation heating the water and reduces the impacts from climate change. This well-established management strategy will benefit high-elevation, cold-water aquatic communities.

Report: Riparian Prioritization and Status Assessment for Climate Change Resilience of Coldwater Stream Habitats within the Appalachian and Northeastern Regions: Among a host of other critical ecosystem functions, intact riparian forests can help to reduce vulnerability of coldwater stream habitats to warming regional temperatures. Restoring and conserving these forests can therefore be an important part of regional and landscape-scale conservation plans, but managers need science and decision-support tools to help determine when these actions will be most effective. To help fill this need, we developed the Riparian Prioritization for Climate Change Resilience (RPCCR) web-based decision support tool to quickly and easily identify, based on current riparian cover and predicted vulnerability to air temperature warming, sites that are priority candidates for riparian restoration and conservation.

Riparian Restoration Decision Support Tool: An innovative riparian planting and restoration decision support tool is now available to the conservation community. This user-friendly tool allows managers and decision-makers to rapidly identify and prioritize areas along the banks of rivers, streams, and lakes for restoration, making these ecosystems more resilient to disturbance and future changes in climate. It will also help the conservation community invest limited conservation dollars wisely, helping to deliver sustainable resources.

The eDNAtlas and Archive for aquatic taxa in Western North America: The ease, efficiency, and sensitivity of environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling of species in aquatic environments is leading to an explosion in its use across North America.

The Stream Continuity Portal: This aquatic connectivity portal is a one-stop shop for tools and regional collaboratives focused on aquatic organism passage (“fish passage”) and fragmentation of river and stream ecosystems. It is a starting place for stakeholders, users, and tool developers looking to keep track of the latest initiatives and better identify opportunities for collaboration and action. This portal is maintained by the North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaborative (NAACC). More coming soon!

National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Awards $1.3 Million in Grants to Conserve Habitat in the Southeast’s Cumberland Plateau: Seven projects will preserve forest and stream habitats, benefiting game species, forest-dependent birds, and fish and mussel species

New “Bobscapes” Mobile App Helps Establish National Bobwhite Database: Although the bobwhite is one of the most researched birds in the country and perhaps the world, scientists still don’t have a solid understanding of the quail’s population distribution across its range. To help alleviate this problem, NRCS has been working with Quail Forever and the University of Georgia Gamebird and Managed Ecosystems Lab as part of the Working Lands for Wildlife – Northern Bobwhite Quail Partnership to develop a new mobile app called Bobscapes