Benefits of Products 
The Office of Water will be supplied with information on the effects of alteration of aquatic 
vegetated habitat on key endpoints (fish, shellfish, and wildlife populations) to support 
development of policies protective of these societally important endpoints. 
Project Title 2: Shoreline, Lake, and Estuary Scale Habitat Research 
Project Coordination and Resources (5.75 FTEs: AED-2.0, GED-0.75, MED-2.0, WED-1.0) 
Objectives 
• Identify the high-priority populations of fish, shellfish, and wildlife in each region; 
identify the habitats that are critical to these populations; and characterize the 
contributions of each habitat to life-support for these populations. Much of this objective 
will be accomplished through synthesizing the available literature. 
• Develop and validate habitat alteration-population response relationships (classified, 
quantitative models) for the identified species and habitats in each region at the scale of 
the shoreline, lake, or estuary. 
• Where feasible, develop and validate comprehensive multi-species models to predict 
quantitative changes in fish, shellfish, and wildlife resource value that would result from 
habitat alteration to a habitat-mapped shoreline, lake, or estuaiy. 
Scientific Approach (Overview) 
This subcomponent of NHEERL habitat research will focus on economically valuable and 
charismatic coastal species that use multiple habitats. Population responses will be evaluated at 
the scale of an aquatic shoreline (including shallow and intertidal habitats through deeper water 
habitats) or at the scale of an entire lake, cove, estuary, or subestuary. This approach is needed 
because many fisheries and wildlife species depend on several habitats in their life histories and 
migratory patterns. Houde and Rutherford (1993) list 21 estuarine-dependent species that make 
up more than 50% of all U.S. commercial fisheries landings, exclusive of Alaska pollock. All 21 
of these species depend on multiple habitats at one or more stages of their life histories. EPA 
needs to plan research that will examine availability and alteration of multiple habitats within 
lakes and estuaries. 
The primary goal of this work is to produce habitat alteration-population response models for 
high-priority populations of fish, shellfish, and wildlife. These habitat alteration-population 
response models will be designed to fit into spatially explicit risk assessment population models. 
A subsequent goal is to produce larger, comprehensive, multi-species models that can integrate 
single-species models to predict the total consequences of habitat alteration to a suite of 
economically valuable and charismatic species. Where vegetated habitats are involved, this work 
will be conducted with strong ties to project 1. These research plans differ in that this project 
examines all the major vegetated and unvegetated habitats at larger scales, but delivers a cruder 
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