Speaker: Gretchen Hansen, Associate Professor, Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, University of Minnesota
Predicting the effects of climate change on the abundance of multiple fish species across diverse lakes at broad spatial scales is fraught with challenges. In this talk, Hansen will discuss tools used to predict the responses of eight freshwater fish species with differing distributions and thermal tolerances to future climate change in lakes throughout the Midwestern United States, including:
- The development of process-based models for simulating temperatures of tens of thousands of Midwestern lakes under climate change.
- Collating fish relative abundance data collected by state and tribal agencies and developed workflows to clean, restructure, and combine datasets to estimate relative abundance of multiple fish species across a seven-state region.
- Developing a spatially explicit, joint species physiologically guided abundance (jsPGA) model that combines laboratory information on thermal preferences and tolerances with empirical data on fish relative abundance for predicting the effects of warming on multiple species concurrently.
Hansen will highlight how interdisciplinary approaches are key for analyzing large datasets to understand and predict community responses to environmental change across diverse ecosystems.
This seminar can also be viewed via our live stream.
Hosted by the Climate, People and the Environment Program (CPEP).