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River-stream connectivity affects fish bioassessment performance.

Nathaniel P Hitt1, Paul L Angermeier

  • 1Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0321, USA. than@vt.edu

Environmental Management
|April 10, 2008
PubMed
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Fish movement between streams and rivers weakens the link between fish communities and local environmental conditions. Adjusting bioassessment methods based on stream network position can improve accuracy.

Area of Science:

  • Ecology
  • Environmental Science
  • Aquatic Biology

Background:

  • Stream bioassessment methods often assume fish assemblages reflect local stressors.
  • However, fish communities are also shaped by regional dispersal from connected streams and rivers.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test if riverine dispersal weakens the relationship between fish communities and local environmental conditions.
  • To compare these relationships in streams with and without connections to large rivers.

Main Methods:

  • Compared fish-environment relationships in mainstem tributaries (flowing into large rivers) and headwater tributaries (lacking riverine confluences).
  • Utilized data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) in the mid-Atlantic highlands (157 sites).

Related Experiment Videos

  • Analyzed data at multiple spatial scales to assess the influence of distance from riverine confluences.

    • Main Results:

    • No significant differences in local environmental conditions were found between headwater and mainstem tributaries.
    • Stream sites within 10 fluvial kilometers of mainstem channels showed weaker fish-environment relationships than isolated headwater sites.
    • This pattern diminished with increasing distance from riverine confluences, supporting the riverine dispersal hypothesis.

    Conclusions:

    • Fish bioassessment metric precision can be enhanced by calibrating criteria based on a site's position within the stream network.
    • The spatial scale of bioassessment studies can be adjusted by including or excluding fish species known to exhibit riverine dispersal.