Grab your lunch and join us on Tuesday, April 14, 2026 at 12 noon in the Hakai Node, as speaker, Dr. Jordan Rosenfeld, discusses:
Overview of a simple Cumulative Effects modelling tool as a pragmatic approach for assessing multi-stressor impacts and management priorities in freshwater systems
Managing the Cumulative Effects (CE) of multiple stressors dispersed across aquatic and terrestrial landscapes is one of the most challenging issues in applied ecology. This is especially true for the conservation and recovery of aquatic species at risk where prioritizing stressor reduction is a key focus of recovery planning, made even more challenging because many species are data-deficient. Dealing with CE is also becoming increasingly important for routine management decisions, where multiple stressors are clearly impacting many species and habitats. Unfortunately, CE models remain largely in the domain of specialized data analysis, with multiple barriers to routine adoption by natural resource management agency staff. These include model complexity, the steep learning curve and time investment required to learn how to use many CE models, large data demands for model parameterization, and lack of generality or transferability. Developing more intuitive, user-friendly, and low barrier CE modelling tools is essential to accelerate more widespread use. Dr. Rosenfeld will provide an overview of the Cumulative Effects Modelling Tool for Prioritizing Recovery Action (CEMPRA, https://essa.shinyapps.io/CEMPRAShiny/), which is a flexible R Shiny App developed to facilitate CE modelling for taxa across a data-deficient to data-rich gradient. It is based on the core concept of explicitly defining stressor-response functions to characterize stressor impacts on habitat capacity of the target species. This will be illustrated with a pilot application to endangered Nooksack dace and Salish sucker, focusing on the development of stressor-response functions for hypoxia impacts on fish growth and mortality. Simple, transparent, modular modelling tools with accessible libraries of stressor-response functions will help lower the barriers to CE modelling and its’ routine adoption in natural resource management.
Speaker: Dr. Jordan Rosenfeld
Aquatic Scientist,
Applied Freshwater Research Unit, BC Ministry of Environment
Jordan grew up in Ontario and did an M.Sc. degree in Zoology at University of Guelph and a Ph.D. in Zoology at UBC studying fish-invertebrate trophic interactions in streams. He has been working as an aquatic research scientist with the Province of British Columbia since 1996. His research focuses on instream flow needs for fish, stream habitat requirements of juvenile salmon and trout, recovery of endangered freshwater fish species, bioenergetic modelling of drift-feeding fishes, and cumulative effects modelling.