A riverscape analysis tool developed to assist wild salmon conservation across the North Pacific Rim

A major constraint for management and conservation of wild salmon is the large geographic area and diversity of rivers that provide critical freshwater habitats for salmon production and sustainability. These habitats span lengths of entire river systems, crossing international borders and management jurisdictions, while encompassing a range of climate and landscape conditions and human impacts. We developed the Riverscape Analysis Project (RAP) to provide a consistent and comprehensive geospatial database to document, assess, and compare the physical habitats of large salmon rivers of the North Pacific Rim (NPR). Here, we introduce and summarize a web-based GIS and decision support system (DSS) to assist salmon conservation around the NPR. The foundation of the RAP database is a seamless mosaic of moderate (30 m) resolution, multispectral satellite imagery from the Landsat TM instrument series, mapped with coincident 90-m resolution digital terrain Digital Evaluation Model (DEM) information to a consistent global projection; these data produced a set of watershed, river, and floodplain physical features and derived riverine freshwater habitat metrics important for salmon. The RAP DSS is publicly available online (http://rap.ntsg.umt.edu) and includes user-friendly tools and tutorials to allow users to compare, query, and download geospatial summary data across a suite of physical metrics.