Fish habitat and biodiversity are valuable ecosystem services provided by rivers. Future land development and climate change will likely alter these services, and an understanding of these responses can guide management and restoration priorities. We used hierarchical models that account for natural differences in ecoregion and river drainage to predict fish biodiversity and the presence of selected indicator fish species within the Albemarle-Pamlico basin, using predictors of land use, flow, temperature, and environmental setting from the USGS NHD Plus dataset.
Results/Conclusions Biodiversity response to flow varied across the region, with the mountain ecoregion and the Chowan subbasin being most sensitive to flow; these regions may also be priorities for restoration. The most parsimonious models for indicator fish species typically included positive responses to either flow or velocity. Odds ratios indicated that the strongest responses to these variables occurred for darters, followed by suckers and eel. We used these models to estimate and map regional changes in these ecosystem services under IPCC-based future scenarios.
