Concordance Among Fish and Macroinvertebrates, Environmental Filters, and Restoration in Small Tributaries

Download or read book Concordance Among Fish and Macroinvertebrates, Environmental Filters, and Restoration in Small Tributaries written by Amelia T. McReynolds and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small tributaries to the Great Lakes are threatened by intensifying land use, barriers to fish movement, and the resulting degradation of water quality and aquatic communities. Recently, restoration efforts have turned to these small but numerous streams as a target which may respond relatively quickly and positively to actions across the watershed. In lower Green Bay, Lake Michigan, small tributaries are scattered across a patchwork of agriculture, developed land, and forest, and have been impacted by landscape-scale stressors. Large-scale collaborative restoration efforts have identified them as a potentially valuable habitat for macroinvertebrates and fish which could play a role in the restoration of the lower Fox River-Green Bay as a system. However, it is unclear how fish and macroinvertebrate communities vary throughout this set of tributaries, and how they are shaped by dynamic environmental conditions. Given this uncertainty, it is difficult to prescribe restoration actions effectively. The first chapter of this thesis will identify environmental variables at several spatial scales that shape fish and macroinvertebrate communities and describe the concordance between these two communities at eighteen stream reaches. Two years of monitoring efforts inform this analysis while revealing strong spatial and temporal variation in stream conditions. Fish and macroinvertebrate communities respond to many of the same environmental variables at multiple spatial scales, exhibiting community concordance which is influenced by connectivity and tributary-specific environmental conditions. In the second chapter, results of this study and prior research in small tributaries to Green Bay will be used with a synthesis of the literature to make restoration recommendations. Many of the same central principles used to guide restoration in dendritic streams may be adapted and applied to small tributaries, given sufficient knowledge of each unique tributary system.