Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Montana Fishery
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The objectives of this project are to assemble and analyze empirical, georeferenced data and analyze data to assess how changes in climate and other factors have influenced the distributions of native and non-native fishes through time. The project is broken down into 2 separate tasks. The first task will be to assemble and analyze fish distribution data and climatic attributes to quantify how changing climatic conditions, among other factors will influence the abundance and distribution of Yellowstone cutthroat trout and non-native species. It will be important within this first task to assess the relative importance of existing threats to native cutthroat trout populations including habitat fragmentation, habitat degradation and loss, non-native species, and changing climatic conditions. The second task will be to assist in synthesizing results into a peer-reviewed manuscript to a scientific journal.