Principle Investigators: Shawn Liston and Jerome Lorenz
Project Start Date: July, 2005
Funding Agency: US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)
Background:The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan is now being implemented to restore lost structure and function to the South Florida landscape. To detect changes in natural and artificial habitats resulting from these restoration programs, quantitative baseline data on the constituent aquatic communities and their ecology are needed before, during, and after restoration actions. Baseline data collections document animal communty composition, ecology, and dynamics, because those animals support many of the predatory species, especially alligators and wading birds. Fishes and aquatic invertebrates are excellent indicators of the health of these wetlands.
Due to large amounts of habitat structure (trees, woody debris, other vegetation) and dramatic inter- and intra-annual hydrologic variation, forested wetlands present a particularly difficult challenge when attempting to quantitatively sample fishes. Traditional fishery methods of towing trawls, pulling seines, or visual censuses simply do not work. Resource managers need quantitative data from a statistically robust experimental design and demonstrated methodology with which to track fish communities over time to distinguish between the effects of natural and human changes
Study ObjectivesTo document the utility of 9-m2 drop traps (Lorenz et al. 1997), 6-m2 bottomless lift nets (Rozas 1992), 1-m2 throw traps (Jordan et al. 1997), drift fence arrays (Loftus et al. 2001), and experimental gill nets (Hubert 1996) in Southwest florida cypress forests
To collect baseline (pre-restoration) data on Big Cypress National Preserve (BCNP) aquatic fauna communities
To develop a statistically robust sampling design for long-term monitoring of aquatic fauna in BCNP cypress forests
Products:
2006 Annual Report (PDF)
References:
Hubert, WA (1996) Passive capture techniques, p. 157-192. In B.R. Murphy and D.W. Willis (eds.). Fisheries Techniques (Second Edition). American Fisheries Society, BEthesda, MD.
Jordan, F, S Coyne & JC Trexler (1997) Sampling fishes in vegetated habitats: effects of habitat structure on sampling characteristics of the 1-m2 throw trap. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 126: 1012-1020.
Loftus, WF, MC Bruno, KJ Cunningham, SA Perry & JC Trexler (2001) The ecological role of the karst wetlands of southern Florida in relation to system restoration, p. 8-15, In E.L. Kuniansky (ed.). U.S. Geological Survey, Karst Interest Group Proceedings. St. Petersburg, FL, Feb. 13-16, 2001. USGS Water REsources Investigations Report 01-4011, Athens, GA
Lorenz, JJ, CC Melvor, GVN Powell & PC Frederick (1997) A drop net and removable walkway used to quantitatively sample fishes over wetland surfaces in the dwarf mangroves of the southern Everglades. Wetlands 17:346-359.
Rozas, LP (1992) Bottomless lifft net for sampling nekton on intertidal marshes. Marine Ecology Progress Series 89:287-292.