Commonalities in stream connectivity restoration alternatives: an attempt to simplify barrier removal optimization

Abstract

Movement within stream corridors is a basic life history requirement of many aquatic organisms. Barrier removal in streams has become a common practice in the United States aimed to restore organism dispersal and meet conservation objectives; however, there are social and economic costs to the removal of barriers. Accordingly, tools to prioritize barrier removal, particularly optimization techniques, can be used to evaluate cost‐benefit trade‐offs. Many of these techniques, however, require programming experience and are not available to natural resource managers. Furthermore, conservation objectives vary considerably depending on the life histories of organisms under consideration, and these opposing objectives, in conjunction with variant socioeconomic costs, will influence optimization solutions, specifically which barriers to remove. To promote the use of optimization tools, straightforward and open‐access platforms are needed to support use by managers, while also providing general approaches for holistic basin‐scale connectivity restoration. Herein, we use two case studies, White Oak Creek (small watershed) and the Roanoke River Basin (large basin), to explore the divergent outcomes stemming from different conservation objectives and socioeconomic costs used to prioritize barrier removal. We conducted optimization modeling using a widely accessible platform along with an open‐access solver plug‐in to support a wide variety of conservation objectives. We used simple approaches to find commonalities in barriers identified for removal among divergent conservation objectives and provide alternative (i.e., hybrid removal‐passage) strategies for approaching habitat restoration for diverse aquatic communities while increasing social benefits (i.e., hydropower energy). As expected, different conservation objectives aimed to support varied species life histories (e.g., diadromy, large‐river vs. small‐river potamodromy) have very different effects on optimization solutions. In both case studies, however, commonalities in solutions were identified through clustering groups of barriers into general connectivity restoration strategies. Furthermore, strategy types for a given barrier could be predicted with ≥72% accuracy using only four metrics. This suggests that optimization results can be simplified into general standards to support adoption of sustainable basin connectivity criteria strategies. Our framework provides a flexible and open‐access approach to conduct relatively complex optimization modeling for stream barrier prioritization, while examining potential for agreement among divergence conservation objectives.

Using knowledge of behaviour and optic physiology to improve fish passage through culverts

“…Central to mitigating the impact of culverts is a need to select sites that are a priority for restoration, both for engineering and ecological reasons. Prioritization tools provide a quantitative and robust decision‐making framework for handling multiple, potentially conflicting objectives (McManamay, Perkin, & Jager, ). For the road networks and culverts, potential considerations include function of the culverts (e.g., pedestrian access, vehicular access, ecological), length of stream to be rehabilitated, species migratory mode, other barriers, presence of exotic species and/or threatened species, and condition of the structure (e.g., poor, good, excellent) to name a few.…”

Prioritizing native migratory fish passage restoration while limiting the spread of invasive species: A case study in the Upper Mississippi River

“…Approaches that use generic structural connectivity measures (i.e., total accessible stream network length) as proxies for habitat gain result in less efficient, more costly solutions (Sethi et al, 2017;Rodeles et al, 2020), prompting calls to move towards functional connectivity measures in dam prioritizations (Branco et al, 2014). Increasingly, prioritizations have utilized functional connectivity measures representing fish diversity, richness, populations, and life history traits (Erős et al, 2018;Ioannidou and O'Hanley, 2019;McManamay et al, 2019;Kemp et al, 2020, King et al, 2021, but attempts to address functional connectivity in dam prioritizations incorporating habitat suitability for individual species have often relied on species ranges. However, relying solely on species range data can result in large potential commission errors and inadequate estimates of habitat overlap with invasive species, as all stream habitat accessible within a species' range is treated as equally suitable (McKay et al, 2017) irrespective of differences in actual habitat quality of different stream segments.…”

How to choose? A bioeconomic model for optimizing river barrier mitigation actions

“…This research presented here contributes to the existing literature on systematic approaches for river connectivity enhancement. Within this literature, there exists a growing number of examples employing optimization based approaches to maximize the amount of functional habitat available for sh (Er®s et al, 2018;McManamay et al, 2019;O'Hanley et al, 2020). There are also papers that derive cost-eective solutions to optimize one or more sh population and socioeconomic metrics (King et al, 2017;Roy et al, 2018).…”