Fish

FORT researchers provide sound science to support the Department of Interior in its efforts to preserve American heritage, streamline species listing decisions and promote species recovery, manage wild horses and burros using efficient, cost-effective tools, and sustain hunting and fishing on public lands. This research is developed in partnership with resource managers from local, State, Federal...

Science information is fundamental to understanding how proposed actions on public lands may impact the environment. However, agencies often have limited time to compile and synthesize existing science. We are working with land management agencies to develop a new type of science product— structured science syntheses—for facilitating the use of science information in public lands decisions.

The Molecular Ecology Laboratory applies innovative genetic and genomic technologies to address a variety of complex questions and issues facing the Nation's natural resources. While we continually update the scale and efficiency of laboratory procedures to meet stakeholder needs, we must also be innovative and flexible in addressing those needs that have no off-the-shelf solution. We help...

The GSIL is a state-of-the-art facility located on the Denver Federal Center that specializes in the measurement of light stable isotope — Hydrogen (H), Carbon (C), Nitrogen (N), Oxygen (O), and Sulfur (S) — compositions and other chemical and biomarker analytes in matrices relevant to the Earth sciences. Chemical and isotopic tracers offer novel insights into ecosystem biogeochemistry, food webs...

Wildlife nutrition is an essential element of fitness, and contextualizing resource use within the broader framework of local and regional food webs is paramount to species health, function, and management.

The distribution of species across the landscape is of great interest to biologists, owing to a critical need to understand the connectivity of disparate habitats for species that undertake broadscale movements. Indeed, habitat quality and quantity are thought to be important drivers of occurrence and distribution, and numerous studies have demonstrated fitness-related consequences as evidenced in...

Environmental stressors that impact habitat and wildlife species include: abiotic factors (for example, land use, temperature); soil, air, and water quality (for example, eutrophication, contaminants); and disturbance (for example, fire, drought, hurricanes, species invasions). Understanding how these stressors impact ecosystems is critical to conservation and management.

Planning and managing outdoor recreation on public land and water entails a series of choices, many of which are economic in nature. Economics is useful for informing a wide range of decision-making processes in the context of outdoor recreation management, including why people choose to engage in recreation and where, how people substitute between different types of recreation activities and...