Conservation status of Chihuahuan Desert fishes in the United States: a spatial perspective

Authors: Joshuah Perkin, Matthew Troia

Year: 2019

Abstract

Native fishes in the American southwest are threatened by anthropogenic landscape alterations involving habitat destruction and dewatering. Consequently, many species are in need of conservation and status assessments are necessary for conservation planning. However, many conservation assessments are based on expert opinions or data available only to the researchers that develop status assessments. There is a need for repeatable, empirically-driven assessment frameworks that can be applied by multiple conservation entities and repeated as new data become available. We present a status assessment framework based on publically available geospatial data and apply this framework to native stream fishes occupying the Chihuahuan Desert region of the United States. Criteria included in the assessing were: (1) area occupied based on open access digital data from the Global Biodiversity Information facility; (2) abundance inferred from probability of occurrence modeled using landscape data and environmental niche modelling (ENM); (3) dependence on humans for persistence based on the percent of occurrences that fall within freshwater protected areas; (4) tolerance to environmental alteration based on cumulative habitat alterations at locations where species occur; (5) genetic risk based on the percent of habitat that is co-occupied by an non-native congener; (6) vulnerability to climate change based on expected climatic shifts where species occur; and (7) anthropogenic causes of declined based on ENM and geospatial data. Scores ranging 1-5 for each of these criteria were averaged to give a quantitative conservation status (1 = endangered; 5 = least concern) for 55 native species occupying the Chihuahuan Desert region of the United States. We present species status ranks and the major factors contributing to current conservation status and hope that Desert Fishes Council members with expert knowledge can provide their opinions.