Mapping Aquatic Habitats
Do you know where the best fish habitats are in your watershed?
People are often interested in finding where the best fish habitats are located in a watershed to inform protection, habitat restoration and field studies.
Agencies, conservation groups, watershed councils and private industry can quickly identify fish habitat hotspots using the NetMap system for a wide range of species.
Habitat intrinsic potential models are used to identify variation in fish habitat abundance and quality.
Habitat intrinsic potential models are used to identify variation in fish habitat abundance and quality. Relevant watershed attributes include channel gradient, channel confinement, flow, turbidity, fish barriers and occurrence of lakes, among others.
NetMap includes published models for:
coho salmon
chinook
pink
chum
steelhead
sockeye (provisional)
westslope cutthroat
coastal cutthroat
bull trout
Geographic specific models exist for Pacific Northwest, Inner Mountain West and Alaska
Do you know the limits of fish habitats in your area?
If you did, you could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of stream buffers.
Using LiDAR, NetMap can be used to identify gradient barriers, including waterfalls.
Identifying the best potential fish habitats
Identifying fish habitats at the stream reach scale (100 meters) is useful for a variety of purposes, but you might be interested in classifying fish habitat potential at the scale of subbasins across large watersheds.
NetMap allows one to classify fish habitat potential ranging from the reach scale, as above, and also at subbasin scales; fish habitat classification schemes can be created at the landscape scale, as shown below for southeast Alaska.
In some areas of the world the digital stream layers are of poor quality.
Many streams are missing which limits identifying important waterways and fish habitats.
NetMap, in conjunction with high resolution DEMs, have been used to expand the extent of mapped streams and rivers. Below is an example where NetMap identified 300% more chinook salmon habitat in the Copper River, Alaska compared to what is contained within the Alaska’s states inventory of fish habitats.
NetMap’s synthetic river networks are particularly useful in remote areas where many streams and other important watershed features (floodplains, riparian zones, unstable slopes) remained unmapped.
Chinook Intrinsic Potential Model identified 300% more chinook salmon
habitats in the Copper River basin, Alaska (Bidlack et al. 2014)
Beaver are often considered a key element of aquatic ecosystems.
NetMap contains a tool for predicting beaver habitats across watersheds.
