A Review of Biological Responses of Diadromous Fishes to Climate Change to Support the 2025 Revisions of the State Wildlife Action Plans.

Burgio, Kevin R.^1,2, Kimberly Cruz³, Noah Jaques³, Eliza Murley³, Hanusia Higgins¹, Alice Lubeck¹, Tracy Melvin², Tracy Rice², Karen Terwilliger², Michelle Staudinger^1,3, ¹United States Geological Survey, Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, ²Terwilliger Consulting Inc., Locustville, VA, ³University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, ⁴Terwilliger Consulting Inc., Locustville, VA

State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs) are proactive planning documents that assess the health of each state’s fish, wildlife and habitats, identify current management and conservation challenges, and outline needed actions to conserve natural resources over the long term. SWAPs are revised every ten years, with the last revision in 2015 and the next revision anticipated in 2025. To aid the Northeast states in drafting their 2025 SWAPs, we are developing a regional synthesis of the biological responses of Regional Species of Greatest Conservation Need (RSGCN) to climate change. Of the ~420 species under review as RSGCN in the Northeast, nine are diadromous fish: alewife, blueback herring, Atlantic salmon, American eel, shortnose and Atlantic sturgeon, American and hickory shad, and rainbow smelt. We conducted a systematic literature search using the R package “LitSearchR” using 26 climate-change-specific keywords to include with the scientific and common names for each RSGCN on Web of Science. We identified ~7200 scientific articles and used the PRISMA 2020 protocols to track the numbers of articles we included and disregarded based on our criteria. The number of research articles for each diadromous species ranged from 1399 (Atlantic salmon) to 17 (American shad), highlighting an imbalance in climate change research for these taxa. Further, we analyzed an existing database of observed climate-change-mediated range shifts to identify spatial and temporal patterns for RSGCN. This presentation will synthesize our findings on the biological responses, climate vulnerability, and linked adaptation actions for each diadromous RSGCN in the Northeast.