Fish that split their lives between fresh and salt water often face obstacles getting back and forth. Dams and roads fracture river networks and interfere with traditional migratory routes, sparking concerns about fish health and abundance, as well as biodiversity on a broader scale.

Efforts to restore fish passage are cropping up across the country, but these projects come with hefty price tags. In a new study, , 91±¬ÁĎ researchers explore whether this money is being well spent by examining the process that determines which projects are prioritized.

The current standard, called score and rank, involves evaluating barriers one by one and assigning a score based on potential gains, such as habitat expansion. Top-ranking projects become leading candidates for funding, but score and rank systems don’t always account for barriers in the full river context. High-scoring projects can yield stranded investments, where removing the barrier doesn’t have the desired outcome because of other barriers downstream or immediately upstream.

“Ideally, barriers that are most downstream will score higher, because they need to come out before the fish can benefit from upstream restoration, but approaches to scoring vary, so this isn’t always the outcome,” said lead author , a 91±¬ÁĎ associate professor of marine and environmental affairs.

As an alternative to score and rank, this study presents a mathematical computer program called optimization. Optimization synthesizes many inputs to make the most of a budget. It can serve as a performance indicator for other systems and highlight opportunities for improving an underperforming system.

“It’s looking at a portfolio instead of going barrier by barrier. In doing so, you can explicitly account for watershed connectivity and evaluate the performance of score and rank,” Jardine said.

As concerns about the health of rivers mounted in recent years, state and federal governments have allocated billions of dollars toward reconnecting them. Fragmentation is an established threat to biodiversity, and recent studies show that a vast majority of river length is not protected by conservation measures.

Washington state is in the midst of a court ordered multibillion dollar effort to remove barriers that block salmon and steelhead from swimming upstream to spawn. The combines score and rank with optimization in a hybrid approach. Similar projects elsewhere tend to use score and rank.

“I think people see optimization as a black box because it’s not as obvious why a barrier rose to the top of the priority list,” Jardine said. “With score and rank, they understand the scores and the process, but we don’t really know what the outcome will be.”

In this study, researchers use fish passage in Western Washington as a case study to compare score and rank to optimization. They show that score and rank performs decently well when the only goal is opening up as much habitat as possible, but adding other variables into the mix, such as habitat quality, compromises its performance.

While optimization has the capability to balance variables, it might not work for everyone. The program needs data to run and someone with a mathematical background to run it. Still, even small tweaks to the score and rank approach can produce results that rival optimization.

“Major change is hard, but minor changes may be enough,” Jardine said.

Because these projects often represent the values of multiple stakeholders, it’s important to include safeguards against stranded investments.

“You need to work from downstream up to make sure the success of a project isn’t contingent upon other projects,” Jardine said. “We’re spending a lot of money on this, but the total cost of restoring all barriers is much higher than the budget, so it’s really important that we make the most out of the financial resources that we have.”

Additional co-authors include , a 91±¬ÁĎ postdoctoral researcher in environmental and marine affairs; , who completed this research as a 91±¬ÁĎ master’s student in environmental and marine Affairs;  J Kahn, who completed this research as a 91±¬ÁĎ master’s student in quantitative ecology and resource management; Andrew Cooke, a 91±¬ÁĎ research consultant in environmental and forest sciences, , a 91±¬ÁĎ research scientist in environmental and forest sciences; , a 91±¬ÁĎ associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and , , , and of NOAA.

This study was funded by Washington Sea Grant and the Rae S. and Bell M. Shimada Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Memory of Warren S. Wooster.

For more information, contact Jardine at jardine@uw.edu.    

Seafood is the world’s most highly traded food commodity, by value, and the product is hard to track from source to market. Reports of seafood mislabeling have increased over the past decade, but few studies have considered the overall environmental effects of this deceptive practice.

A study by Arizona State University, the 91±¬ÁĎ and other institutions examined the impacts of seafood mislabeling on the marine environment, including population health, the effectiveness of fishery management, and marine habitats and ecosystems.

The , recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that some 190,000 to 250,000 tons of mislabeled seafood are sold each year in the U.S., making up 3.4% to 4.3% of all the seafood consumed. Farmed Atlantic salmon, often labeled and sold as Pacific salmon or rainbow trout, is the second-most-consumed mislabeled seafood product in the U.S., just behind shrimp.

Co-author , an assistant professor in the 91±¬ÁĎ School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, helped to design a statistical analysis to compare the product on the label with the one that was actually consumed.

“It’s important to consider mislabeled consumption, rather than mislabeling rates, when thinking about the various biological and environmental impacts of mislabeling,” Jardine said.

“You can have a species that’s mislabeled the majority of the time, but if the consumption of that species is low, then the amount of the mislabeled product consumed is also low, and it may not be as big of a management concern.

“On the other hand, you can get products with low mislabeling rates and high consumption, meaning that a lot of the mislabeled product is being consumed. We find this is the case for giant tiger prawns being sold as white leg shrimp, and for Atlantic salmon being sold as Pacific salmon.”

The authors used the program that assesses about 85% of seafood consumed in the U.S. and offers consumer recommendations for more sustainable choices. The authors combined those scores with mislabeling and consumption rates to compare the population health and fishery management of the species actually consumed versus the one on the label.

Genetic techniques can tell whether a seafood product is being marketed as a similar, higher value species, a switch that can happen at many points in the supply chain.

The most widely-consumed mislabeled product is shrimp, the most popular seafood in America. Imported giant tiger prawns, that are in Seafood Watch’s “Avoid” category, can end up labeled as white leg shrimp, in the “Best” category.

Salmon came in second on the amount of mislabeled seafood consumed. Farmed Atlantic salmon, in the “Avoid” category, can end up labeled as Pacific salmon or rainbow trout, typically in the “Best” or “Good” category.

More generally, the study shows that false labeling tends to substitute a less sustainable product. Substituted seafood was 28% more likely to be imported from other countries, which often have weaker environmental laws than the ones covering the domestic seafood listed on the label.

“In the United States, we’re actually very good at managing our fisheries,” said lead author , an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability. “We assess the stock so we know what’s out there. We set a catch limit. We have strong monitoring and enforcement capabilities to support fishers adhering to the limit. But many countries we import from do not have the same management capacity.”

In 86% of cases, substitutes for wild-caught species came from fisheries that performed worse in terms of population impacts — species abundance, fishing mortality, and bycatch and discards — than the species on the label. Mislabeling also tended to disguise bad management practices: 78% of the substituted seafood had lower fishery management effectiveness than the product listed on the label.

“The expected species is often really well managed,” Kroetz said.

Public attention has tended to focus on frequently mislabeled species even if Americans consume less of those products.

“There’s been a lot of media attention given to the mislabeling rates of a particular species, such as halibut and snapper,” Jardine said. “But a big-picture analysis shows that we should also focus on other species if we are concerned about the environmental impacts.”

The effects of seafood mislabeling are not just environmental, the authors write, but also economic and social, affecting seafood consumers and the sustainable fishing industry.

“If the seafood sustainability movement was better integrated with seafood mislabeling testing, rate estimation and regulatory tracing programs, we could provide the consumer with better information regarding the biological, social and economic implications of the products that they consume,” Jardine said.

The study was funded by the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation and Resources for the Future. The work was also supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center in Annapolis, Maryland, with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Other co-authors are Patrick Lee, Katrina Chicojay Moore and Andrew Steinkruger at the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Resources for the Future; C. Josh Donlan and Gloria Luque at the Williamsburg, Virginia-based nonprofit Advanced Conservation Strategies; Jessica Gephart at American University; and Cassandra Cole at Harvard University.

For more information, contact Jardine at jardine@uw.edu or Kroetz at kailin.kroetz@asu.edu.

Adapted from an ASU . See also a from Advanced Conservation Strategies.