Not well understood and important to the fish community is how hypoxia changes fish distribution, species composition, and spatial overlap, thus altering species interactions. Declining water quality may force fish into suboptimal habitat, increase predator/prey overlap or create refuges for tolerant prey species, changing both growth and survival rates. We are examining how the declines in water quality may impact the fisheries resource through potential habitat losses, altering species interactions and changing condition and growth rates of the fish populations. We will be collecting water quality parameters (temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen) and fish biweekly. Trawling will give us information on fish species composition, relative abundance, size of fish, and several measures of fish health (tumors, external signs of disease, growth and condition indices).
Fisheries Gridding
The following longitude, latitude pairs define a regular grid laid over the River. These points will initially be sampled for hydrographic properties and then subsampled for fisheries based on the results of the hydrographic sampling. |
