anadrofish: Anadromous fish population responses to dams

Diadromous fishes world-wide experienced precipitous declines during the 19th and 20th centuries due to a combination of overfishing, pollution, and freshwater habitat loss through construction of dams (Limburg & Waldman, 2009). Following wide-spread fishing closures and large-scale remediation of many historical pollution sources, dams in coastal rivers remain as the largest tractable impediment to population recovery for many of these species (Waldman & Quinn, 2022). In some cases, dams reduce access to as much as 95% of freshwater and rearing habitat (Hall et al., 2011). These effects are especially pronounced for species that rely on long-distance migrations to spawning and rearing habitat upstream of barriers such as various alosines (herrings; e.g., American shad Alosa sapidissima, alewife A. pseudoharengus, and blueback herring A. aestivalis (Noonan et al., 2012)) and salmonines (trout and salmon; e.g., Salmo spp. (Parrish et al., 1998) and Oncorhynchus spp. (Quiñones et al., 2015).

Traditional stock assessment tools such as per-recruit analyses often fail to capture management complexities related to diadromous life histories such as fish passage at dams, and integrated assessment models can be difficult to parameterize for data-poor species such as herrings (Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, 2024). This has resulted in the development of species- and system-specific approaches to fisheries stock assessment and management strategy evaluation (Barber et al., 2018; Nieland et al., 2015; Roy et al., 2018; Stich et al., 2019). We created the anadrofish package (Stich, Hardesty, et al., 2025) for R (R Core Team, 2025) to provide a generalized approach that also allows broader application to novel species, systems,
and scenarios.