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RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN HABITAT ARRANGEMENT AND JUVENILE WINTER FLOUNDER DENSITY IN NARRAGANSETT BAY
Citation:
Cicchetti, G, L Meng, AND S. Raciti. RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN HABITAT ARRANGEMENT AND JUVENILE WINTER FLOUNDER DENSITY IN NARRAGANSETT BAY. Presented at Estuarine Research Federation Conference, Seattle, WA, September 14-18, 2003.
Description:
We used aerial photography in conjunction with a 1-m beam trawl attached to a videocamera with GPS overwrite and a YSI water quality logger to quantify fish densities and characterize habitats in Narragansett Bay and in Rhode Island's coastal lagoons. We compared fish counts from the beam trawl to aquatic habitats and shoreline development characterized at larger scales from the air to examine correlations between habitat arrangement and fish densities. We sampled 160 randomly chosen transects in 2002 and 2003, pulling the trawl/videocamera/logger perpendicularly from shore on two minute tows from a small boat. Most fish caught were juveniles of the economically valuable winter flounder, Pseudopleuronectes americanus. We also flew over these same sampling locations at morning low tide conditions with a 1.4 megapixel fast frame rate digital camera mounted in an aircraft, capturing a 500 m wide swath of overlapping images with a 40 cm pixel size. This allowed a spatial assessment of habitat type, area, and arrangement. We conclude that aerial imagery is a valuable tool for habitat mapping at larger spatial scales, and can be effectively used for spatial valuation of habitat areas by combining aerial habitat maps with quantitative information on valued living aquatic resources.