relevance, and identifying data and models available to make these linkages. 
2. Devising assessment and measurement endpoints and strategies for the fish, shellfish, and 
wildlife populations and habitat elements of concern so that measurements are comparable or 
complementary and informative across regions, ecosystems, and habitats. 
3. Developing habitat alteration-population response relationships for the species and habitats of 
concern capable of quantifying effects of both incremental and catastrophic habitat alteration. 
The relationships must deal with both individual habitat components and interactions among 
them. Habitat-biota relationships may require intermediate steps to properly describe the linkage 
pathways (e.g., to capture the productivity subsidy to fishes from coastal wetland vegetation). 
4. Devising regionalization and classification schemes reflecting the range and distribution of 
coastal habitats and ecosystems to identify biogeographic expectations and capture ecosystem 
constraints and forcing factors. 
5. Identifying data sets and approaches for extrapolation, both to specific unstudied systems, and 
to make inferences for the population of systems from the suite sampled. 
Component 2 
NHEERL plans to pursue the influence of human activities on habitat at landscape, regional, and 
watershed scales via two conceptually linked,studies. One project will examine watershed and 
landscape scale habitat issues affecting recovery of Pacific Northwest salmon, and fishes reliant 
upon Great Lakes coastal wetlands. A second project will examine the interaction of a suite of 
anthropogenic stressors including habitat alteration affecting piscivorous birds (e.g., common 
loons) distributed across heterogeneous lake districts. Unlike the wetland/nearshore research 
described above. Component 2 research projects emphasize modeling and Geographic 
Information Systems (GIS), and explicitly consider the interaction among habitat alteration and 
other stressors. Common components of these research projects include: 
1. Identifying data sets, approaches, and measurements for characterizing the factors, including 
habitat alteration and other stressors that affect selected species or assemblages at large or 
hierarchical spatial scales. 
2. Developing and comparing approaches, indices, and models for extrapolating from individual 
or local habitat-biota relationships to effects on regionally-distributed populations or 
metapopulations. 
3. Assessing the importance of spatial structure and connectivity of habitats via modeling efforts 
at varying spatial scales and resolutions. 
Research Projects 
This plan is divided into four parallel but closely linked projects. Project 1 {Coastal Vegetated 
Habitat Research) addresses societally important endpoints of concern that are affeaed by 
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