Modeling Effects of Climate Change on Pallid Sturgeon in the Missouri River

• Activity Number: 356
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Rima Dey*+ and Christopher K. Wikle and Mark L. Wildhaber and Edward H. Moran and Christopher J. Anderson and Kristie J. Franz
• Companies: University of Missouri at Columbia and University of Missouri and Columbia Environmental Research Center and Columbia Environmental Research Center and Iowa State University and Iowa State University
• Keywords: Climate change ; Hierarchical Bayesian computation ; Scaphirhynchus albus ; Uncertainty ; Bioenergetics ; Population model

Abstract

Pallid sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus albus) are rare in the Missouri river basin and were federally listed as endangered in 1990. To protect this fish population, reliable mathematical models are needed to help predict the response of populations to potential climate change and quantify the predominant sources of uncertainty. This may suggest how to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change on sturgeon populations and could prove useful to identify research questions focused on recovery efforts. Assessing the effect of climate change on the ecosystem requires implementation of multiscale climate models in a hierarchical framework. Climate projections made by global climate models (GCMs) must be downscaled by regional climate models to obtain regional projections that can be linked with watershed models, river hydraulic models and population models in a way that sensibly propagates uncertainty across scales. This talk focuses on implementation of an individual-based bioenergetics model for pallid sturgeon, which provides a means for quantifying the relative importance of various environmental factors on individual growth and consumption given various climate scenarios.