AUTHORS: Jason Ross, US Fish & Wildlife Service; Mark Brouder, US Fish & Wildlife Service; Aaron Murphy US Geological Survey; Mathew Walker, US Geological Survey
ABSTRACT: Member agencies of the Mississippi Interstate Cooperative Resource Association (MICRA) are actively implementing management and control actions to reduce the spread and abundance of invasive carp species that are established and expanding their range in the Mississippi River Basin. MICRA formed an Invasive Carp Advisory Committee (ICAC) to coordinate the planning, execution, and evaluation of collaborative actions to prevent, detect, and control invasive carp populations. Currently, the information and data collected and needed to evaluate the effectiveness of the various control and management actions being implemented are housed and dispersed among the individual agencies or entities. These information and data “silos” are difficult to discover and access by the various MICRA member agencies, the ICAC working groups and modelers tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of control and management efforts across the landscape, and other interested parties. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey, working on behalf of the ICAC Data Analysis Workgroup, are developing a web-based platform known as CarpDAT (Data, Analysis and Tools) that intends to improve the discoverability and accessibility of invasive carp information and data being collected across the Mississippi River Basin by compiling and consolidating it in a single location.
