Environmental indicators of habitat quality in a migratory freshwater fish fauna
In general, diadromous (and particularly amphidromous and catadromous) freshwater fishes decline in frequency of occurrence, change age/size structure, and probability also decline in abundance with increasing elevation and distance upstream from the sea. In freshwater fish faunas with a high proportion of migratory species, as in New Zealand, these changes in occurrence and abundance result in a breakdown of the relationship between fish abundance and habitat quality, making application of the index of biotic integrity (IBI) as a measure of habitat quality problematical since the index depends on the relationship between population metrics and habitat quality. An alternative approach applicable to assessing temporal changes in habitat quality and that uses a large database on fish distributions, involves analysis of the distribution of species across their natural distributions. In this paper, the authors generate curves of occurrence of species across ranges of altitude and distance inland and show, through comparisons of data subsets, that the curves are consistent estimators of species' occurrence and therefore useful as indicators of habitat quality.
- Research Organization:
- National Inst. of Water and Atmospheric Research, Christchurch (NZ)
- OSTI ID:
- 20020716
- Journal Information:
- Environmental Management, Vol. 25, Issue 4; Other Information: PBD: Apr 2000; ISSN 0364-152X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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