Abstract
Fisheries populations heavily rely upon estuarine habitats, yet most traditional management tactics have not incorporated habitat parameters into stock assessments. An important first step in the transition towards ecosystem-based fisheries management is to characterize and identify habitat features alongside native species populations. This form of fisheries management can help establish baselines and detect ecological changes such as habitat degradation or the introduction of new species. The Nature Conservancy Rhode Island Chapter’s Block Island Program (TNC BI) has a long-running juvenile fish survey within the island’s Great Salt Pond (GSP). However, little work has been done to understand the reasoning behind species presence in the GSP. This project was designed to address this gap in knowledge by creating a rapid approach to classifying habitats and analyzing their relationships with TNC BI’s existing fisheries data. Actual data collection did not occur during the 2023 field season, but this survey will help to better understand fish-habitat relationships in Block Island’s GSP as well as provide a long-term monitoring strategy when it is fully deployed in 2024. Although we developed this protocol to be used by inter-agency scientists and external entities, we found that individual methodologies will vary based on geographic location as well as the resources available to the investigative team.