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

Growing human populations, irrigation water demands, and plans to increase water storage capacity intensify the need to understand how fish respond to drought to establish realistic targets for managing populations and at-risk species. This project proposes to address species resilience and vulnerability to drying events to provide fish-habitat association and distribution data that could be used to inform Native Fish Conservation Area planning and instream flow recommendations in the middle Colorado River basin. Information on species responses with respect to the severity and extent (spatial and temporal) of drying will provide evidence-based inferences about how projected increases in climate- or anthropogenically-driven intermittence may influence recruitment dynamics and fish assemblage structure, including fish species of greatest conservation need.