SNRE professor leads international efforts to standardize monitoring methods for freshwater fish

Standardization is essential across the sciences, but until recently, methods of monitoring freshwater fish have varied significantly based on geographic region. Scott A. Bonar, a professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment (SNRE), is leading the charge to change that.

Bonar, who specializes in fisheries management and conservation, explained that standardization offers real benefits for researchers and conservationists, allowing them to communicate and collaborate more efficiently.

"It also gives us reliable means to document rare species and offers a larger sample size to evaluate management techniques," he said. "And standardization across large regions allows measurements of large-scale effects of climate and geography."

Bonar has worked on international standardization issues with various agencies over the past two decades, including the American Fisheries Society, World Fisheries Conference and the United Nations. He also served as lead editor on Standard Methods for Sampling North American Freshwater Fishes, which has become an important resource for numerous state agencies across North America and is now in its second edition.

He's also a driving force behind a website, designed and developed in collaboration with CALES and SNRE staff, which enables scientists to quickly compare condition, growth and abundance of fish collected in a particular body of water with range-wide, ecoregion and state averages and percentiles, based on thousands of data sets collected across North America.