Can indicator species guide conservation investments to restore connectivity in Great Lakes tributaries?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Can indicator species guide conservation investments to restore connectivity in Great Lakes tributaries? Kimberly B. Fitzpatrick1,2 • Allison T. Moody3 • Austin Milt3 • Matthew E. Herbert4 Mary Khoury4 • Eugene Yacobson4 • Jared A. Ross4 • Patrick J. Doran4 • Michael C. Ferris5 • Peter B. McIntyre2,3 • Thomas M. Neeson1
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Received: 28 January 2020 / Revised: 20 October 2020 / Accepted: 11 November 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In many applications, conservation organizations depend on one species to indicate the presence of another. While extensive research has gone into methods for selecting these indicator species, few studies have directly measured the performance of indicator species in guiding conservation actions. Here, we evaluated whether a small number of indicator species could be used to efficiently select barrier removal projects to restore breeding habitat access for many other Great Lakes migratory fishes in the highly fragmented tributaries of the North American Great Lakes. First, we used a dataset of the historical distributions of 35 species of native migratory fishes to identify four clusters of co-occurring species, and then selected an indicator species for each cluster based on withingroup co-occurrence or range width. We evaluated the utility of these indicator species by using upstream habitat and removal costs for 103,894 dams and road culverts across 1800 tributaries of the Great Lakes. We compared the potential increase in accessible tributary habitat for each species when barrier removals were prioritized to maximize benefits for (1) each species itself, versus (2) possible indicator species. We found that for 80% of the species, habitat gains from indicator-based project selection were at least 75% of the maximum gains possible under species-specific planning. However, a small subset of species would receive few habitat gains under indicator-directed project selection. Overall, our findings suggest that a suite of indicator species could be an efficient basis for planning restoration efforts for a majority of native migratory fishes in the Great Lakes. Keywords Surrogate species Fragmentation River restoration Freshwater Dams Road culverts
Communicated by Angus Jackson. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-02002084-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Kimberly B. Fitzpatrick [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Biodiversity and Conservation
Introduction Conservation organizations often lack the resources and detailed ecological data to tailor conservation decisions for each individual species in an ecosystem (Whittaker et al. 2005; Bini et al. 2006; McCarthy et al. 2012). Instead, practitioners often rely on one or few species (surrogate species) to represent other species (beneficiary species) during conservation planning (Caro and O’Dohert
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