Assessing Historical Fish Community Composition Using Surveys, Historical Collection Data, and Species Distribution Models

Abstract

Accurate establishment of baseline conditions is critical to successful management and habitat restoration. We demonstrate the ability to robustly estimate historical fish community composition and assess the current status of the urbanized Barton Creek watershed in central Texas, U.S.A. Fish species were surveyed in 2008 and the resulting data compared to three sources of fish occurrence information: (i) historical records from a museum specimen database and literature searches; (ii) a nearly identical survey conducted 15 years earlier; and (iii) a modeled historical community constructed with species distribution models (SDMs). This holistic approach, and especially the application of SDMs, allowed us to discover that the fish community in Barton Creek was more diverse than the historical data and survey methods alone indicated. Sixteen native species with high modeled probability of occurrence within the watershed were not found in the 2008 survey, seven of these were not found in either survey or in any of the historical collection records. Our approach allowed us to more rigorously establish the true baseline for the pre-development fish fauna and then to more accurately assess trends and develop hypotheses regarding factors driving current fish community composition to better inform management decisions and future restoration efforts. Smaller, urbanized freshwater systems, like Barton Creek, typically have a relatively poor historical biodiversity inventory coupled with long histories of alteration, and thus there is a propensity for land managers and researchers to apply inaccurate baseline standards. Our methods provide a way around that limitation by using SDMs derived from larger and richer biodiversity databases of a broader geographic scope. Broadly applied, we propose that this technique has potential to overcome limitations of popular bioassessment metrics (e.g., IBI) to become a versatile and robust management tool for determining status of freshwater biotic communities.

Development and evaluation of species distribution models for fourteen native central U.S. fish species

“…Distribution models for fish species regularly include variables of temperature, precipitation, drainage area, elevation, stream slope, discharge, land use, width, depth, and geology (Leathwick et al, 2005;Lassalle et al, 2008;Buisson & Grenouillet, 2009;Lyons et al, 2010;Steen et al, 2010;Bond et al, 2011;Labay et al, 2011;Wenger et al, 2011). It is possible that the particular variables were removed for having little influence on model performance that actually have strong impacts on species distributions at different scales.…”

“…A variety of species distribution modeling approaches have been used to project fish distributions, including GLM (Lassalle et al, 2008;Wenger et al, 2011), GAM (Brosse & Lek, 2000Buisson et al, 2008;Lassalle et al, 2008), CTA (Lyons et al, 2010;Steen et al, 2010), and MAXENT (Labay et al, 2011). The ensemble modeling approach, however, has not been widely applied to fish species (but see Buisson & Grenouillet, 2009;Grenouillet et al, 2011;Poulos et al, 2012).…”

“…The ensemble modeling approach, however, has not been widely applied to fish species (but see Buisson & Grenouillet, 2009;Grenouillet et al, 2011;Poulos et al, 2012). Within the United States, fish distribution models have largely been limited to small watersheds (Steen et al, 2010;Labay et al, 2011), single species (Brewer et al, 2007), or impacts of nonnative species (Sharma et al, 2011;Wenger et al, 2011;Poulos et al, 2012). Recent state-wide modeling efforts in Wisconsin (Lyons et al, 2010), Maryland (Maloney et al, 2013), and other states have resulted in the development of several distribution models for common stream fishes.…”

Assessing anthropogenic impact on boreal lakes with historical fish species distribution data and hydrogeochemical modeling

“…The high coherency between the two methods validates the use of historical fish species composition as a tool to esti- mate anthropogenic pressure. We used acidification as an example, and we are convinced that this approach can be used with other species to address other environmental concerns in other regions than Sweden, such as; climate change (Hein et al, 2012), effects of land alterations (Nilsson et al, 2005;Labay et al, 2011), and other airborne pollutants. The analysis showed that 64 lakes were not classified as acidified using either MAGIC or roach observations ( Fig.…”

Endocrine disrupting chemicals in aquatic environments: A potential reason for organism extinction?

“…Given the extent of the population losses, the extinction was probably caused by EDCs, although this hypothesis remains to be confirmed. In recent years, several models were developed based on historical data and museum records, and connections between EDC pollution and species extinction have been found Duffy, 2011;Labay et al, 2011). Barnosky et al (2011) confirmed that environmental pollution is one possible cause of biodiversity decline.…”