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In many applications, conservation organizations depend on one species to indicate the presence of another. While extensive research has gone into methods for selecting these indicator species, few studies have directly measured the performance of indicator species in guiding conservation actions. Here, we evaluated whether a small number of indicator species could be used to efficiently select barrier removal projects to restore breeding habitat access for many other Great Lakes migratory fishes in the highly fragmented tributaries of the North American Great Lakes. First, we used a dataset of the historical distributions of 35 species of native migratory fishes to identify four clusters of co-occurring species, and then selected an indicator species for each cluster based on within-group co-occurrence or range width. We evaluated the utility of these indicator species by using upstream habitat and removal costs for 103,894 dams and road culverts across 1800 tributaries of the Great Lakes. We compared the potential increase in accessible tributary habitat for each species when barrier removals were prioritized to maximize benefits for (1) each species itself, versus (2) possible indicator species. We found that for 80% of the species, habitat gains from indicator-based project selection were at least 75% of the maximum gains possible under species-specific planning. However, a small subset of species would receive few habitat gains under indicator-directed project selection. Overall, our findings suggest that a suite of indicator species could be an efficient basis for planning restoration efforts for a majority of native migratory fishes in the Great Lakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydraulic fracturing and related ground water issues are growing features in public discourse. Few have given much attention to surface impacts from shale gas development, which result from building necessary surface infrastructure. One way to reduce future impacts from gas surface development without radically changing industry practice is by formulating simple, conservation-oriented planning guidelines. We explore how four such guidelines affect the locations of well pads, access roads, and gathering pipelines on state lands in Pennsylvania. Our four guidelines aim to (1) reduce impacts on water, reduce impacts from (2) gathering pipelines and (3) access roads, and (4) reduce impacts on forests. We assessed whether the use of such guidelines accompanies tradeoffs among impacts, and if any guidelines perform better than others at avoiding impacts. We find that impacts are mostly synergistic, such that avoiding one impact will result in avoiding others. However, we found that avoiding forest fragmentation may result in increased impacts on other environmental features. We also found that single simple planning guidelines can be effective in targeted situations, but no one guideline was universally optimal in avoiding all impacts. As such, we suggest that when multiple environmental features are important in an area, more comprehensive planning strategies and tools should be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]