The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Federal Subsistence Management Program will continue conducting a water temperature monitoring project for the next two summers at rivers and streams throughout Alaska. This effort is associated with fisheries monitoring projects funded through the Fisheries Resource Monitoring Program (Program), and has been ongoing since 2008. According to the Program, temperature can impact fish through changes in metabolic rate, primary production, respiration, growth, decomposition, water chemistry, migration timing and susceptibility to disease. At the same time “[d]evelopment adjacent to stream habitats…as well as changes in climate can potentially cause fluctuations in water temperature beyond the behavioral and physiological tolerance of aquatic organisms, including fish, that could have a deleterious effect on their productivity and availability to subsistence users.”
Federal, State, and Tribal organizations in Alaska are currently collecting water temperature data for such subsistence streams. The Program is looking to highlight the importance of uniform data collection, standardization, and reporting, to ensure that such data is reliable for monitoring climate change and supporting conservation actions.
The Alaska Online Aquatic Temperature Site (AKOATS) platform, hosted by the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Alaska Center for Conservation Science, is currently used to make this data available to the public. The platform was developed with the idea that it would serve as a centralized location to access stream temperature monitoring data collection across Alaska.