NRTG’s MicroCourses offer a dynamic training pathway that’s as flexible as it is enriching to build expertise. Our Planning and Designing Fish Habitat Assessments, spanning four hours, delivers in-depth training in an easily digestible format. It’s designed to maximize your skills for immediate application.
A well-designed stream fish habitat assessment collects the relevant information to accurately and concisely describe the site, but avoids spending time collecting unnecessary data that does not provide insights. The information collected by different aspects of the assessment should be complementary so that a full picture of site conditions at time of sampling, and also under different flows, may be created. This Micro-Course describes strategies and approaches to selecting specific methods, in a defensible manner and combining information from a range of scales, to complete efficient and effective fish habitat assessments. Participants are assumed to have working knowledge of the standard stream fish habitat assessment methods. Planning and Designing Fish Habitat Assessments is intended for fisheries people working in environments where the fish habitat assessment procedure is not rigorously prescribed by regulators. This is a companion Micro-Course to Interpreting Fish Habitat Assessment information.
Topics covered will include:
- Determining purpose of assessment
- Identifying species/assemblage most interested in
- Desktop analysis to become familiar with watershed, functioning, use
- Selecting methods – including assessing how you will interpret data (companion course)
- Selecting locations to assess
Course will be 4 hours long.
Instructor Profile
Sean Mitchell, PhD, RP Bio
NRTG Program Manager
Sean Mitchell has conducted stream assessments since the mid-1990s and these have included work in northern British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. He has seen stream assessment methods and approaches vary geographically, over time, and by jurisdiction. It is this wealth of experience that he distills down for the modern practitioner to understand the advantages and disadvantages, what the data tell us, and how to form a coherent picture of the habitat from the various, often disconnected, methods.
