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Establishing Consistent Fish Sampling Methods for Biological Assessments on Inter-state Great Rivers: A Case Study on the Upper Mississippi River.
Citation:
PEARSON, M. S., A. D. BARTELS, AND J. T. DUKERSCHEIN. Establishing Consistent Fish Sampling Methods for Biological Assessments on Inter-state Great Rivers: A Case Study on the Upper Mississippi River. Presented at American Fisheries Society meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, September 12 - 16, 2010.
Impact/Purpose:
To document research results.
Description:
The use of Indices of Biotic Integrity (IBI) to assess aquatic waters has become an acceptable practice for many Clean Water Act (CWA) agencies. For states that share waters such as Minnesota and Wisconsin along the Mississippi River, the states’ respective IBIs may show vastly different results. This could be related to the agencies using different sampling protocols in these border waters. As part of the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program for Great River Ecosystems (EMAP-GRE), we conducted a study to quantitatively assess three fish sampling methods. We used a three-way, paired design using probabilistic and fixed sites on the Mississippi River along the MN-WI border. These methods were independently developed by EMAP-GRE, MN Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and WI DNR (WDNR) for use on large to nominally great rivers. Primary differences included length and placement of transect sampled, boat speed, number of dippers/booms, and dip net mesh size. Results of program head-to-head comparisons show MPCA methods yielded significantly (p<0.05) greater fish abundance and species richness values than EMAP-GRE methods, but IBI scores were not significantly different.