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Identification and Prediction of Fish Assemblages in Streams of the Mid‐Atlantic Highlands, USA
Author(s) -
Cyterski Michael,
Barber Craig
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
transactions of the american fisheries society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.696
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 1548-8659
pISSN - 0002-8487
DOI - 10.1577/t05-011.1
Subject(s) - sculpin , catostomus , cottus , electrofishing , minnow , salvelinus , fishery , lepomis , notropis , ecology , biology , etheostoma , trout , abundance (ecology) , fish <actinopterygii>
Management of aquatic resources requires meaningful assessment endpoints on which to base decisions. In freshwater streams, assessment endpoints are often defined as fish communities. Given the limited resources available for environmental monitoring, having a means of predicting fish assemblages in streams where no sampling has yet occurred would be useful. Such a tool could be used for regional screening‐level analyses of fish communities and could be input into local‐scale model applications for evaluating management scenarios of stream degradation or restoration. In this study, a set of fish assemblages (a list of fish species and their corresponding relative abundances) representative of different stream types in the Mid‐Atlantic Highlands region of the United States was defined by use of a k ‐means cluster analysis performed on relative abundance estimates. The cluster analysis produced 18 fish assemblages, and the following 14 species had the greatest relative abundance in at least one of the 18 assemblages: Eastern blacknose dace Rhinichthys atratulus , bluehead chub Nocomis leptocephalus , bluntnose minnow Pimephales notatus , brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis , central stoneroller Campostoma anomalum , creek chub Semotilus atromaculatus , fantail darter Etheostoma flabellare , mottled sculpin Cottus bairdii , mountain redbelly dace Phoxinus oreas , redbreast sunfish Lepomis auritus , rosyside dace Clinostomus funduloides , slimy sculpin Cottus cognatus , striped shiner Luxilus chrysocephalus , and white sucker Catostomus commersonii . A discriminant analysis was then used to predict a stream's potential fish assemblage based on stream and watershed characteristics. The discriminant function had a 42% success rate using the following predictors: Latitude, longitude, mean stream depth, percent urban area of the watershed, and percent fine gravel on the stream bottom. The discriminant function was validated with an independent data set from a regional data collection effort in West Virginia, resulting in 44% success when classifying observed stream fish communities.