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

Appropriation of water resources will continually increase with the rapidly growing human population in South Carolina, increasing 11.3% from 2010 to 2019. Protecting instream flows for ecosystem services will be one of society’s great challenges this century. South Carolina is a water-rich state that will face unique challenges and opportunities as demand increases. Protecting instream flow from anthropogenic alterations and maintaining ecosystem services of water resources first requires an understanding of the relationship between aquatic organisms and instream flow. Accordingly, the goal of the proposed project is to identify key relationships between flow metrics and biotic response (flow-ecology relationships) in the State’s eight, major river basins and to use these relationships to predict the response of aquatic organisms to changes in streamflow and water withdrawals to inform river basin planning across the State.