We face an unprecedented challenge in climate change. Covering 71% of the earth’s surface, water is our lifeblood. Not only do we drink it to survive, but we also rely on it for clean energy, transportation, coastal living, recreation, to grow food, and for the wild bounty aquatic ecosystems provide. With climate change, we are facing longer droughts and less water; we have more dramatic flood events; rising sea levels, and our waters are warming, holding less oxygen, and becoming more acidic.

These impacts are fundamentally changing our aquatic ecosystems. Fish experience direct mortality or change their behavior to cope, redistribute or die off; invasive species spread further and faster into new, now more habitable environments; food webs change altering predators and prey; physical habitat diminishes; and disease and toxic algae become more prevalent. Further, our demand for water for clean energy, drinking, and growing food only exacerbates these impacts.

The USGS Western Fisheries Research Center (WFRC) is responding to these dynamic and growing challenges by addressing the need for science to support more accurate, agile, and responsive natural resource management. For example:

Invasive species – Invasive species including European green crab, African clawed frog, zebra and quagga mussels, redside shiners, and warmwater fish such as Northern pike and walleye are all provided a competitive advantage in the Northwest as waters warm and slow in flow with climate change. WFRC scientists are working with our partners to improve our detection and control of these species, assesses the growing impacts of climate change, and provide tools to help managers make difficult decisions regarding where to allocate their efforts.

Disease – Warming waters both stress our native coldwater fish (e.g., salmon and trout) and favor the abundance of some pathogens. This combination leads to increased fish mortality. This is a concern for both wild fish and the millions of fish that are farmed and reared in hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest. WFRC staff are working to evolve the use of eDNA as a “biosurveillance” tool for broadly and cost-effectively detecting and monitoring pathogens. We are also working with partners from many other Centers to establish a national aquatic disease and pathogen database called AquaDepth. This database will be used by USGS and our partners across the nation as a central hub for monitoring and assessing patterns in pathogen prevalence and disease.

Food web dynamics – Our Ecosystems Division is applying bioenergetics models, visual foraging models, and eDNA assays, integrated into directed field sampling and experimentation to examine how shifting thermal and flow regimes influence survival and productivity of freshwater and anadromous salmonids.

Dam management and dam removal –Dams are under greater scrutiny with water becoming warmer and increasingly scarce. WFRC staff are helping managers determine the amount and temperature of water that must be allocated for fish and their habitats in places like the Klamath, Willamette and Sacramento River basins. They are also tracking data at major dam removal sites including the Elwha River, Little White Salmon River and the forthcoming Klamath Dam removals.  

Our current experience with climate impacts is just the tip of the iceberg. We will continue to increase our science efforts in the areas listed above and tackle other developing climate change impacts such as sea level rise.

Science is our compass. Without it, we are at risk of losing our way in this changing world.