Eastern North America contains the greatest diversity of freshwater mussels in the world. Additional information on threats and on habitat requirements and distributions of freshwater mussels is necessary to preserve diverse freshwater mussel communities, as many species are in decline. Models of freshwater mussels can predict species distributions by determining natural and anthropogenic environmental factors within the watershed, riparian area, or upstream that may influence occurrences. Subwatershed-based models developed for Elliptio complanata and E. dilatata in the Mid-Atlantic and Ohio drainage regions of the United States using existing survey data performed well on training datasets but did not accurately predict independent species occurrences. Additional studies are necessary to evaluate the quality of existing data, the utility of subwatershed-based models, and the feasibility of modelling freshwater mussel distributions across large extents.

Nomenclature: Turgeon et al., 1998.