Regional fish community indicators of landscape disturbance to catchments of the conterminous United States

Characterizing coal and mineral mines as a regional source of stress to stream fish assemblages

“…We conducted our study within three ecoregions in the eastern portion of the United States, selected from aggregated ecoregions used in the USEPA's National Wadeable Streams Assessment (WSA) (US EPA, 2006) and the 2010 National Fish Habitat Partnership (NFHP) inland assessment (Esselman et al, 2013). The Northern Appalachian ecoregion (NAP), Southern Appalachian ecoregion (SAP) and Temperate Plains ecoregion (TPL) (Fig.…”

“…To account for known influences of catchment area, slope, elevation, precipitation and groundwater inputs to streams on distributions and abundances of stream fish assemblages, we controlled for these natural factors in analysis following Esselman et al (2013). We developed boosted regression tree models (Elith et al, 2008) for each assemblage metric in each ecoregion using least-disturbed sites from the ecoregion and important natural landscape predictors.…”

“…For instance, loss of lithophilic spawners suggests that fish assemblages may be influenced by hydrologic alteration (Grabowski and Isley, 2007) and/or siltation of coarse substrates (Berkman and Rabeni, 1987). Consideration of changes in functional traits of fishes with disturbances is the basis for monitoring biological integrity of stream systems (Karr et al, 1986;Karr, 1991) and for stream assessment efforts (e.g., Esselman et al, 2013), as it yields insights into where and how to prioritize management actions for conservation of species of interest.…”

Stream biomonitoring using macroinvertebrates around the globe: a comparison of large-scale programs

“…Examples of international integration exist, including the European Fish Index (EFI, EFI+) project, which was successful in building a unified method because a standard protocol existed for electrofishing (CEN), sampling occurred during the summer low-flow period, the entire sample was processed to species, and a single index was developed collaboratively by the international research team funded by the EU (Pont et al 2006). A similar approach was taken in the climatically and hydromorphologically diverse USA by the USEPA: standard field and laboratory methods were developed by a collaborative multiinstitutional research team ; all samples were processed by accredited taxonomy laboratories; and a research team developed national and regional biological indices Stoddard et al 2008;USEPA 2013;Esselman et al 2013). Similar to the EFI project, the collaborators were united in the goal of developing national methods and indicators, and the USEPA provided the funding for the research, monitoring, data management, index development, and reporting.…”

Predicting aquatic vertebrate assemblages from environmental variables at three multistate geographic extents of the western USA

“…We still lack a clear understanding of how hierarchical processes structure river ecosystems across multi-state or national geographic extents, despite increased interest in assessing aquatic ecological condition at those extents (e.g., SRA, 2004;Pont et al, 2006;Esselman et al, 2013). Biological assemblage responses to natural gradients and anthropogenic disturbances have been studied at multiple geographic extents (Roth et al, 1996;Fitzpatrick et al, 2001;Strayer et al, 2003) because catchment-scale patterns are believed to influence site-scale conditions (Frissell et al, 1986;Ricklefs, 1987;Tonn, 1990;Poff, 1997;Hughes et al, 2006).…”