NFHP Coastal Assessment

The National Fish Habitat Partnership (NFHP) is a voluntary, regionally-based consortium focused on protection, restoration, and enhancement of important fish habitats across North America. The National Fish Habitat Action Plan calls for national assessments of U.S. aquatic habitats every five years, beginning in 2010. These assessments provide national perspectives on fish habitat and complement and support assessment efforts by regional Fish Habitat Partnerships (FHPs). The goals of the National Fish Habitat Assessment are to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relative condition of fish habitats at national and regional scales, identify intact and degraded habitats, define key disturbance factors, and illustrate the scope and effectiveness of habitat conservation activities over time.

The marine portion of the National Fish Habitat Assessment seeks to compare estuary condition relative to anthropogenic stress gradients and identify key stressors and the scale at which they exert the greatest influence. In the absence of wide-scale, high-resolution habitat data, this project uses fish presence and abundance data as indicators reflecting the condition of the local habitats where they live, feed and reproduce. Fish abundance data from state and national programs, as well as time-varying landscape environmental data and local habitat and disturbance data, attributed to a hierarchically nested geospatial framework contribute to the analyses using a series of statistical models.

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