anadrofish: Anadromous fish population responses to dams

Journal of Open Source Software
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Abstract

Diadromous fishes world-wide experienced precipitous declines during the 19th and 20th centuries due to a combination of overfishing, pollution, and freshwater habitat loss through construction of dams (Limburg & Waldman, 2009). Following wide-spread fishing closures and large-scale remediation of many historical pollution sources, dams in coastal rivers remain as the largest tractable impediment to population recovery for many of these species (Waldman & Quinn, 2022). In some cases, dams reduce access to as much as 95% of freshwater and rearing habitat (Hall et al., 2011). These effects are especially pronounced for species that rely on long-distance migrations to spawning and rearing habitat upstream of barriers such as various alosines (herrings; e.g., American shad Alosa sapidissima, alewife A. pseudoharengus, and blueback herring A. aestivalis (Noonan et al., 2012)) and salmonines (trout and salmon; e.g., Salmo spp. (Parrish et al., 1998) and Oncorhynchus spp. (Quiñones et al., 2015).

Traditional stock assessment tools such as per-recruit analyses often fail to capture management complexities related to diadromous life histories such as fish passage at dams, and integrated assessment models can be difficult to parameterize for data-poor species such as herrings (Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, 2024). This has resulted in the development of species- and system-specific approaches to fisheries stock assessment and management strategy evaluation (Barber et al., 2018; Nieland et al., 2015; Roy et al., 2018; Stich et al., 2019). We created the anadrofish package (Stich, Hardesty, et al., 2025) for R (R Core Team, 2025) to provide a generalized approach that also allows broader application to novel species, systems,
and scenarios.

Suggested Citation

Stich, D.S., Hardesty, J.D., Jordan, N.T., Roy, S.G., Sheehan, T.F., Snyder, S.D., and Zydlewski, J.D., 2025, anadrofish: Anadromous fish population responses to dams: Journal of Open Source Software, v. 10, no. 112, 8564, 4 p., https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.08564.

Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title anadrofish: Anadromous fish population responses to dams
Series title Journal of Open Source Software
DOI 10.21105/joss.08564
Volume 10
Issue 112
Year Published 2025
Language English
Publisher Open Journals
Contributing office(s) Coop Res Unit Leetown
Description 8564, 4 p.
Additional publication details