Our paper: “Summer temperature regimes in southcentral Alaska streams: watershed drivers of variation and potential implications for Pacific salmon” has just come out in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. We posed some specific questions: Which streams run hot? Which streams run cold? And does that change year to year? We also considered the potential implications for different salmon species and life stages now and in the future.
A collaborative network of federal, state, tribal and community entities collected data from 2008–2012. Sue Mauger, Cook Inletkeeper’s Science Director, and co-authors Rebecca Shaftel and Daniel Rinella from the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Jason Leppi with The Wilderness Society found that some streams will remain as important cold-water habitats supporting healthy salmon populations for generations to come. But some streams are warming and will continue to do so putting cold-water loving salmon under increasing stress.
Water temperature in the Deshka River, which is a large lowland tributary to the Susitna River and a large producer of Chinook salmon, reached above 76 oF in 2009. This baseline dataset will allow us to accurately assess the rate of change in our watersheds in response to a changing climate. We continue to monitor 17 streams in Cook Inlet including the Deshka River where maximum temperatures reached 76.6 oF in 2016.
Our paper concludes that targeted management strategies can increase resilience in freshwater systems as our climate warms, such as improving riparian vegetation to shade streams, restoring fish passage to provide access to cold-water refugia, and identifying sensitive areas for conservation. These strategies plus continued monitoring to provide fisheries managers with current information is our best chance for long-term viability of the region’s salmon populations. Our research and protection efforts are now guided by this stream-specific information.
We are happy to see that new regional water temperature monitoring networks have started recently in Bristol Bay, Kodiak Archipelago and in southeast Alaska.
The article is open access and available here: http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjfas-2016-0076
You can read more about our stream temperature work here.