Impacts of Road Crossings on Fish Movement and Community Structure

Abstract

We quantified the impact of four commonly used road crossings (bridge, arch culvert, box culvert, and pipe culvert) on stream fish community structure and movement in the Piedmont region of the Cape Fear River basin of North Carolina, USA during summer 2004. We focused on non-perched crossings, which did not present a physical barrier to fish movement. With the exception of species richness, all response variables (fish population size, species diversity, fish index of biotic integrity, and conditional percentage of movement) did not vary significantly with crossing type, position (upstream and downstream), or month. Streams with arch culverts contained significantly higher species richness than streams with bridges. The general lack of stream fish abundance and diversity responses to road crossings may be due to the insensitivity of stream fish community variables to anthropogenic effects, the insensitivity of fish communities to the presence of crossings, the overall resilience of fish communities, or the shifting baseline theory (fish communities having shifted to a different community prior to sampling). Triple-pass electrofishing results suggest that these road crossings had no detectable effect on fish abundance or diversity.

Effects of coupled natural and anthropogenic factors on the community structure of diadromous fish and shrimp species in tropical island streams

“…Still, atyid and palaemonid shrimps are unable to surmount a culvert in French Polynesia with a >60 cm drop from the pipe to the stream substrate (Resh, 2005). Culverts often limit dispersal of fishes (Trombulak & Frissell, 2000;Norman et al, 2009) but do not necessarily alter fish community structure (Vander Pluym, Eggleston & Levine, 2008). In our study, most fish species were present up and downstream from the four culverts that were Stream communities on a tropical island 1011 downstream from natural barriers, but some culverts might restrict the movement of individuals, especially during periods of low flow.…”

Genetic Assignment of Brook Trout Reveals Rapid Success of Culvert Restoration in Headwater Streams

“…), consequences of impassable culverts in other linear systems include reduced species composition (Warren and Pardew ; Vander Pluym et al. ; Nislow et al. ), genetic differentiation (Torterotot et al.…”

“…Assessments of culvert passability have utilized both biological indices (including mark and recapture; e.g., Vander Pluym et al. ) and population characteristics (e.g., species richness; Nislow et al. ), but the results of these types of studies can be inconclusive due to low recapture numbers (Bouska and Paukert ) and temporal effects (e.g., migration; Blank et al.…”

Fish Passage through Culverts in Central Michigan Warmwater Streams

“…The majority of culvert passage studies in peer-reviewed literature have focused on streams in the western (e.g., Belford and Gould 1989;Beechie et al 1994;Rosenthal 2007;Burford et al 2009;Price et al 2010) or southern (e.g., Warren and Pardew 1998;Benton et al 2008;Vander Pluym et al 2008;Norman et al 2009) United States. However, few studies to date have focused on modified streams in an agricultural setting.…”