Publications

Fishery biologists spend considerable effort over multiple years collecting data on fish population and community status using a particular sampling method or set of methods. However, new (and often more effective) sampling methods and technologies are continuously being developed. To incorporate these new sampling techniques, fishery biologists need a means for converting sample data...

Since its establishment in 1903, the National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS) has grown to 635 units and 37 Wetland Management Districts in the United States and its territories. These units provide the seasonal habitats necessary for migratory waterfowl and other species to complete their annual life cycles. Habitat conversion and fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, and...

Streams collect runoff, heat, and sediment from their watersheds, making them highly vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbances such as urbanization and climate change. Forecasting the effects of these disturbances using process-based models is critical to identifying the form and magnitude of likely impacts. Here, we integrate a new biotic model with four previously developed physical...

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Standardization of electrofishing can help reduced the variability of survey data and potentially reduce injur of fish. Without standardization, differences among collections can be partially attributed to disparities in electrofishing methodology, intensity of the electrical field, and size of the electrical field rather than to disparities in fish abundance, population structure, or...

The sex-age-kill (SAK) model is widely used to estimate abundance of harvested large mammals, including white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Despite a long history of use, few formal evaluations of SAK performance exist. We investigated how violations of the stable age distribution and stationary population assumption, changes to male or female harvest, stochastic effects (i.e...

This important reference book provides standard sampling methods recommended by the American Fisheries Society for assessing and monitoring freshwater fish populations in North America. Methods apply to ponds, reservoirs, natural lakes, and streams and rivers containing cold and warmwater fishes. Range-wide and eco-regional averages for indices of abundance, population structure, and...

Estimation of harvest rates is often a critical component of fishery stock assessment and management. These assessments are often based on catch-at-age data sets generated over many years, but estimates of instantaneous fishing mortality (F) can also be obtained from a shorter-term tag return study. We conducted a 2-year tag return experiment to generate direct estimates of F for...

This chapter describes standardized sampling techniques for routine monitoring and population assessment of warmwater sport and prey fishes in small standing water bodies. Although water temperature regulates growth, survival, and reproduction of fishes, there are no specific criteria that define a warmwater fish community. Dodds (2002) noted that warmwater fish communities tend to be...

Telemetry has allowed researchers to document the upstream migrations of anadromous fish in freshwater. In many anadromous alosine telemetry studies, researchers use downstream movements (“fallback”) as a behavioral field bioassay for adverse tag effects. However, these downstream movements have not been uniformly reported or interpreted. We quantified movement trajectories of radio...

We initiated a long-term hemlock ecosystem monitoring study in 1998 on the New River Gorge National River (NERI) and Gauley River National Recreation Area (GARI), in Nicholas, Fayette, and Raleigh counties, West Virginia, to quantify the effects of hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) on forest ecosystem dynamics. Hemlock vigor and degree of adelgid infestation were sampled in each fall 1998...