Headwater streams and wetlands are integral components of watersheds that are critical for biodiversity, fisheries, ecosystem functions, natural resource‐based economies, and human society and culture. These and other ecosystem services provided by intact and clean headwater streams and wetlands are critical for a sustainable future. Loss of legal protections for these vulnerable ecosystems would create a cascade of consequences, including reduced water quality, impaired ecosystem functioning, and loss of fish habitat for commercial and recreational fish species. Many fish species currently listed as threatened or endangered would face increased risks, and other taxa would become more vulnerable. In most regions of the USA, increased pollution and other impacts to headwaters would have negative economic consequences. Headwaters and the fishes they sustain have major cultural importance for many segments of U.S. society. Native peoples, in particular, have intimate relationships with fish and the streams that support them. Headwaters ecosystems and the natural, socio‐cultural, and economic services they provide are already severely threatened, and would face even more loss under the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule recently proposed by the Trump administration.
The Oregon Coast landscape displays strong spatial patterns in air temperature, precipitation, and geology, which can confound our ability to detect relationships among land management, instream conditions, and fish at broad spatial scales. Despite this structure, we found that a suite of immutable or intrinsic attributes (e.g., reach gradient, drainage area, elevation, and percent weak rock geology of the catchments draining to each of our 423 study reaches) could explain much of the variation in pool surface area across the landscape and could contribute to an estimate of how many juvenile coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) one might expect to find in those pools. Further, we found evidence of differences in pool surface area across land ownership categories that reflect differing management histories. Our results also suggest that historical land and river management activities, in particular splash dams that occurred at least 50 years ago, continue to influence the distribution of juvenile coho salmon and their habitats today.
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