Freshwater fisheries management and conservation decisions are often made within local jurisdictions (states, provinces or territories) rather than at regional or federal levels. Local agency responsibilities include monitoring and assessment, the regulation and management of common species and invasive species, and the designation of jurisdictional conservation status for rare species. Conservation status is often inconsistent across jurisdictions (e.g. Mandrak & Cudmore, 2010). Inconsistencies in designated status can be due to real differences in populations and threats or due to differences in the criteria or data used for local designations (Faucheux, 2019) and lead to differences in management approaches across a species range. Additionally, North American freshwater ecoregions, watersheds and species distributions cross state, provincial and territorial boundaries raising the question of whether local-scale management addresses challenges at biologically relevant scales for species (Jelks et al., 2008).Local-scale decision making has not historically addressed regional-scale changes in species distributions (Paukert et al., 2021).