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

Compile existing information on Puerto Rico fish passage barriers, perform site visits on selected barriers, search for undocumented barriers, and develop a comprehensive document and web site describing known natural and artificial fish passage barriers. (1) Existing information on Puerto Rico river barriers will be compiled from published documents by governmental agencies, the military, and private industry; (2) as warranted to fill gaps in existing information, selected sites will be visited by project personnel to verify the existence and condition of barrier structures; (3) guided by existing literature, personal communications, and patterns in fish and macroinvertebrate distributions published by the Principal Investigator (Kwak et al, 2007) and other investigators, project personnel will search for undocumented river barriers first using existing aerial photography, followed by site visits as necessary to describe existing barriers that may not be documented elsewhere; and (4) all findings will be cpompiled into a comprehensive report, including a map indicating locations of all known fish passage barriers. A web site (i.e., series of linked html files) will also be developed linking map locations to descriptive information about each barrier. These findings will then be incoroprated into research and modeling to describe and understand patterns of native and introduced fish in Puerto Rico to facilitate conservation of native amphidromous fish species.