Goals 
The overarching goal of this plan is to provide the scientific basis for assessing the role of 
essential habitat in maintaining healthy populations of fish, shellfish, and wildlife and the 
ecosystems upon which they depend. 
Such a scientific understanding is essential in devising habitat protection and restoration 
priorities and schemes. The spatial pattern and temporal dynamics of habitats and habitat 
conditions within landscapes play significant roles in the long-term viability of aquatic 
populations, species assemblages, and ecosystem functions. Ecosystem level responses to 
stressors are functions of both the tolerance of individual species and habitats to those stressors, 
and the spatial distribution and connectivity of habitats within the landscape. Furthermore, 
habitat components themselves play ecosystem roles that mediate the response of species and 
assemblages to stressors. Finally, habitat influences populations and assemblages at hierarchical 
spatial scales ranging from patches (micro-scale) to entire ecosystems (macro-scale) to 
watersheds or regions (landscape scale). Understanding how effects of anthropogenic stressors 
are mediated by alteration in habitat quality, abundance, and configuration at various spatial 
scales is necessary in order to develop aquatic resource protection criteria and to predict the 
resiliency, restorability, and recovery of fish and wildlife populations and their supporting 
ecosystems. 
More specifically, APGs and APMs for the research are: 
APG 1 FY02 Provide suites of relevant fish, shellfish, and wildlife species endpoints suitable for 
setting regional-scale habitat protection criteria for coastal systems, along with preliminary 
reviews of methods, modeling approaches, and available data for relating habitat alteration to 
changes in those species. 
APM 1A FY02 Listings of the high-priority species of fish, shellfish, and aquatic- 
dependent wildlife for study in each biogeographic region, and listings of the habitats that 
are considered to be critical to each (WED). 
APG 2 FY04 Provide models for linking habitat alteration stressors and mercury to the regional 
problems of Northeast Loons and to landscape-watershed alterations for Pacific salmon. 
APM 2A FY03 Prototype watershed-stream network modeling approach for Pacific 
salmon (WED). 
APM 2B FY04 Habitat suitability indices to support population models for projecting 
relative risks of multiple stressors including toxic chemicals and habitat alteration to 
common loons (AED). 
APG 3 FY04 (GPRA # 8) Provide demonstration stressor-response relationships and/or models 
linking loss and alteration of habitat to selected fish, shellfish, and wildlife endpoints. 
APM 3A FY03 Penaeid shrimp dependence on seagrass habitat (GED). 
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