Final Report: Data provision and projected impact of climate change on fish biodiversity within the Desert LCC

Abstract

The four primary objectives of this project were to: (1) compile a dataset of fish occurrence records for the entirety of the Rio Grande drainage in the US and Mexico; (2) improve that dataset by reformatting dates, synonymizing species names to a modern taxonomy, georeferencing localities, and flagging geographic outliers; (3) for those species with sufficient data for modeling, create species distribution models (SDMs); (4) use the environmental conditions determined via those models to project the species distributions into the future under two climate scenarios. To accomplish those objectives, we compiled 495,101 fish occurrence records mined from 122 original sources into a single database. We then, on the basis of text string searches of the original sources' verbatim locality fields, extracted 145,426 records that we judged to have a reasonable likelihood of being from the Rio Grande drainage. For those records we edited taxonomy, reformatted dates, and finally georeferenced 59,156 (41%) records, which proved sufficient for constructing SDMs for 36 species that met a priori quality assurance criteria. We provide basic interpretation of these models and discuss projections of them into several different future climate forecasts. Products include raw model outputs and symbolized maps helpful in interpretation and comparison, as well as raw data sets and recommendations regarding how all of these product might be used in future management and research efforts.