This app classifies watersheds in Canada for four conservation objectives (area-based protection, habitat restoration, at-risk species management, and non-native species management) based on the methods outlined in Chu et al. (submitted)
National watershed classifications are available through this app. These are based on level 6 HydroBASIN watersheds (Lehner and Grill, 2013).
Default values to weight each watershed index are based on expert scores but users can customize the weightings by sliding the cursors left or right.
Six watershed indices are considered for each conservation objective:
Watershed stress Intensity of human activities in a watershed based on cumulative threat dataset (Hirsh-Pearson et al., 2022). Scaled to range from 0 to 100.
Fish species at risk richness Number of COSEWIC listed fish species at risk with a watershed. Scaled to range from 0 to 100.
Fish species richness Number of fish species (including native, foreign, and translocated species) within a watershed. Scaled to range from 0 to 100.
Community rarity Index of the relative rarity of fish species within in the amount, from Minns (1987). Scaled to range from 0 to 100.
Community change Index of the amount of change in a fish community between the native species pool and the species found in each watershed. Scaled to range from 0 to 100.
Climate change Index of the forward bioclimatic velocitiy in a watershed by 2055 under the RCP 4.5 scenario (Adaptwest Project, 2023; Carroll, 2023). Scaled to range from 0 to 100.
Select whether you want watersheds to be ranked within their freshwater ecoregion (i.e. high rankings = high for that ecoregion). Default (unchecked) value is that rankings are conducted at a national scale.
AdaptWest Project. (2023). Gridded CMIP6-based climatic velocity data for North America at 1km resolution. Available at adaptwest.databasin.org (accessed August 2024). Carroll, C. (2023). Velocity of climate change for North America based on CMIP6 GCMs [Data set]. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10631707. Chu et al. submitted. Classification of Canadian watersheds for freshwater fishes and fish habitat conservation Hirsh-Pearson, K., Johnson, C. J., Schuster, R., Wheate, R. D., & Venter, O. (2022). Canada’s human footprint reveals large intact areas juxtaposed against areas under immense anthropogenic pressure. FACETS, 7(1), 398-419. Lehner, B., Grill G. (2013). Global river hydrography and network routing: baseline data and new approaches to study the world’s large river systems. Hydrological Processes, 27(15): 2171–2186. Minns, C. K. (1987). A method of ranking species and sites for conservation using presence-absence data and its application to native freshwater fish in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Zoology, 14(1), 43–49.
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