Journal
ECOHYDROLOGY
Volume 8, Issue 6, Pages 1095-1108Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/eco.1566
Keywords
Atlantic salmon; river habitat; cold-water refugia management strategy; river thermal diversity; climate change; hyporheic flow; habitat engineering; groundwater
Categories
Funding
- Canada Research Chairs Program
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [CRDJ 379745-08]
- Ouranos
- Hydro-Quebec
- NSERC
- J.D. Irving Limited
- Miramichi Salmon Association
- Miramichi River Environmental Action Committee
- NB Environmental Trust Fund
- Wildlife Fund
- O'Brien Fellowship
- Catamaran Brook Habitat Research Project [129]
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Summer water temperatures are rising in many river systems in North America, and this warming trend is projected to intensify in the coming decades. Cold-water fish may alleviate thermal stress in summer by aggregating in discrete cold-water plumes that provide thermal refuge from high ambient river temperatures. Reliance on cold-water thermal refugia is expected to increase in a warming climate, and many river reaches already lack suitable thermal refugia as a result of an absence of thermal diversity. A comprehensive fish management strategy could proactively address this imminent threat to cold-water fish populations across North America by preserving existing thermal refugia, augmenting thermal anomalies to improve performance as refugia, and creating new thermal refugia in uniformly warm river reaches. We provide practical recommendations on how these measures can be accomplished based on insight derived from recent research focused on the Miramichi River, New Brunswick. Opportunities include limiting land use change, construction aggregate extraction (e.g. sand and gravel pits), and groundwater pumping/consumption. Existing thermal anomalies can be enhanced by controlling advective thermal mixing between cold-water tributaries and the river mainstem flow, installing riparian shading, and adding temporary structures for protection from avian predators. New refugia can be created by temporarily pumping groundwater to discrete points within the river during periods of thermal stress. These concepts are discussed in the context of a comprehensive thermal refugia management strategy. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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