The Masterplan to Save Our Nation's Richest Rivers

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The Masterplan to Save Our Nation's Richest Rivers

The University of Georgia River Basin Center and the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute recently published a comprehensive survey of aquatic animals in Southeastern watersheds.

Aerial view of stream restoration site at the Wahachee Creek mitigation bank in the Upper Savannah Watershed. (c) Mitigation Management, Inc.This first-of-a-kind study used information on where aquatic animals live gathered directly from field researchers, universities, museums and government agencies.

The report’s creators hope it will serve as a call to action for protection and restoration, helping to chart future conservation efforts in the region.

Among scientists, the Southeast is renowned as a hotspot for freshwater wildlife, but the life that teems beneath the surface of its rivers and streams — a veritable underwater rainforest — remains relatively unknown to the general public.

After decades of being overlooked, conservationists think the time has come for the region to take its rightful place in the spotlight.

“The Southeast’s rich aquatic communities are globally significant. There’s nothing else like our biodiversity anywhere else on the continent or anywhere else in the temperate world,” said Dr. Duncan Elkins, the study’s coordinator and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Georgia River Basin Center.

All southeastern states have incredible aquatic life, but the study spotlights areas with higher diversity and at greater risk of imperilment. Take one look at the report’s heat maps, and the Southeast’s ecological significance becomes impossible to ignore.

The maps use colors to represent the variety of species in a given area — warmer colors indicating greater diversity — and are based on the distribution of almost 1,050 fish, crayfish and mussel species in almost 300 watersheds spanning 11 states. The vivid red-and-orange bullseye centered on Middle and Southeast Tennessee, Northwest Georgia and Northern Alabama clearly shows why this region is so biologically significant.

By highlighting the region’s most diverse watersheds, the study will help to focus future scientific research and guide conservation groups to areas where intervention can have the greatest impact.

Scientists “scored” each watershed based on three characteristics: the number of species it contained, the conservation status of those species and how widespread each species was. Areas containing a larger variety of species, many endangered or threatened species or species found in few or no other locations were ranked higher.

According to the study, the 10 highest-priority watersheds are:

1. Pickwick Lake (Middle Tennessee/Northern Alabama) 
2. Wheeler Lake (Middle Tennessee/Northern Alabama) 
3. Cahaba (Central Alabama) 
4. Upper Clinch (Northeast Tennessee/Southwest Virginia) 
5. Middle Coosa (Northeast Alabama) 
6. Lower Duck (Middle Tennessee) 
7. Conasauga (Southeast Tennessee/Northwest Georgia) 
8. Lower Coosa (Central Alabama) 
9. Etowah (Northwest Georgia) 
10. Caney (Middle Tennessee)

The story of the Southeast’s freshwater ecology is one of both unrivaled diversity and rampant imperilment.

Experts place the region’s plethora of aquatic wildlife on equal footing with that of species-rich tropical ecosystems. More than 1,400 species reside in waterways within a 500-mile radius of Chattanooga, Tenn., including about three-quarters (73.1 percent) of all native fish species in the United States. More than 90 percent of all American mussel and crayfish species live within that same area.

More than a quarter of the species included in the study are found nowhere else in the world, yet 28 percent of Southeastern fish species are considered imperiled, more than doubling during the last 20 years fueled by intensive human development and a lack of financial support for regional conservation efforts.

About the study 

Read the complete study online.

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