Harlow Summer Seminar - June 6, 2024, William Fetzer

Big fish eat little fish: An expanded framework to guide aquatic resource management

Speaker: William Fetzer, University of Wyoming
Time: Thursday, June 20th, 5:30pm, talk begins at 6:30pm
Location: UW-NPS Research Station at the AMK Ranch, in the Berol Lodge

Water resource and fisheries managers, policy makers, and stakeholders require a clear understanding of relationships between fish, habitats, and people to guide their decisions. Changes in the environment and human decisions can have a strong influence on environmental quality and fisheries, making it difficult to balance conflicting interests. Here, I present an expanded framework to link environmental conditions with fish community dynamics and productivity and discuss application of this framework to on-going research in the Laurentian Great Lakes and large reservoirs in Wyoming. Across space and time, fish assemblages generally vary predictably along environmental gradients as species characteristics shift to reflect habitat gradients, including depth, temperature, and productivity, which are often correlated. Within a range of habitat conditions, fisheries productivity is hypothesized to be driven by community composition and the balance of predators and prey. Together these two forces interact to drive how the food web converts energy to biomass. By weaving our hypothesis and stories about the relationships between people, habitat, and fish, within a unified framework, we can begin to discuss options to achieve our shared goals.