Fisheries concerns in resource planning on National Forests include: increased sedimentation, increased turbidity, water temperature changes, flow regime alteration, increased probability of mass movement, and current harvest regulations. Several habitat assessment methods have been developed that describe fisheries habitat capability, limiting factors on production, and potential for improvement. Methods that predict effects on fisheries habitat of alternative management scenarios through time (suitability), however, have not been refined. Several methods of relating changed land management practices to improvement or degradation of fishery habitat and therefore to fishery production potential are discussed and evaluated. At present there is no completely defensible predictive system but some current efforts hold promise of quantifying independent variables and how they interact to measurably change fish habitat.
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