Recording: Climate and land-use change impacts on the distribution and abundance of non-native fish in the Tennessee and Cumberland River Basins with Xingli Giam

October 23 at 1pm ET

Join us for a project summary seminar hosted by PI, Xingli Giam. He will discuss the results of their SE CASC funded project.

Abstract

Climate change and land use change are key threats to stream ecosystems in the southeastern US. Mean summer air temperature has accelerated since the 1990s and mean annual temperature is expected to further increase by ~1.9-2.4°C by 2050 in this region. Further, there have been extensive land use change over the past few decades, and this trend will likely persist due to continued urban growth. Due to these changes, warming temperatures and changing flow regimes in streams might cause new habitats to become hospitable for invasive fish. Mitigation of fish invasions and their impacts are management priorities for state and federal agencies; however, it is unclear how geographic ranges and abundances of non-native fish have changed in the southeastern US.

Here, we bridge these knowledge gaps by working with partners from state and federal agencies and nonprofits to leverage monitoring data from fish community surveys conducted by their organizations as well as fish occurrence data from ichthyological collections and public databases to quantify and map distributional range shifts and abundance changes of non-native fish over the past ~30 years in the biologically important Tennessee
and Cumberland river basins. We also used species distribution modeling to identify stream segments projected to be at risk from continued invasions under future climates.

Our work can be used by policymakers and managers to identify locations for monitoring potential fish invasions and to inform conservation efforts to mitigate fish species invasions and their impacts on stream ecosystems.

About Xingli Giam

Xingli Giam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). He completed my B.Sc. (1^st class honours) and M.Sc. degrees in Biology at the National University of Singapore in 2007 and 2010, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University in 2014. 

Xingli’s research program at UTK focuses on characterizing and mitigating anthropogenic impacts on the environment with a particular emphasis on freshwater systems. Xingli leverages large continental-scale environmental, biological, and socioeconomic datasets to answer policy-relevant questions in conservation across multiple spatial scales. These projects span multiple ecological and human systems, including examining the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and nonnative species invasions on native fish communities in the Appalachians, and the impacts of land-cover/use change on freshwater systems and human livelihoods in southeast Asia.