Journal Title
Wetlands Ecology and Management
Keywords
Great Lakes ·
 Coastal Wetlands
 Fish Diversity
 Water Quality
 Functional Groups
 Fish Diets
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2022-01-27
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Brockport Environmental Science and Ecology Faculty Publications
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Wetlands Ecology and Management 2022.pdf
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/8510
Abstract
Great Lakes coastal wetlands (GLCW) have been severely degraded by anthropogenic activity over the last several decades despite their critical role in fish production. Many Great Lakes fish species use coastal wetland habitats for spawning, feeding, shelter, and nurseries throughout the year. The goal of our study was to compare GLCW fsh community composition in the spring, summer, and fall months and investigate how water quality relates to fish diversity, the presence of functional groups, and juvenile fsh diets. We summarized fsh data collected from GLCW across the basin and used the coastal wetland monitoring program’s water quality-land use indicator to quantify water quality. Basin-wide, we found taxonomic and functional group diferences in community composition among three sampling seasons, as well as across the range of water quality. Water quality was positively associated with the abundance of small cyprinids and the relative abundance of some habitat and reproductive specialists. Seasonal differences were also observed for many of these functional groups, with more temperature- and pollution-sensitive fishes captured in the spring and more nest-spawning fishes captured in the summer and fall. In our diet study, we found that age-0 fish primarily consumed zooplankton in the fall, whereas age-1 fish primarily consumed macroinvertebrates in the spring. Moreover, wetland quality was positively associated with trichopteran prey abundance. We concluded that taxonomic and functional composition of fish communities in GLCW vary markedly with respect to water quality and season. Thus, a full understanding of communities across a gradient of quality requires multi-season sampling.
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-022-09862-8
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Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi. org/10.1007/s11273-022-09862-8.
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This item was submitted to an available accessibility checking program and was deemed accessible. If there is any issue with accessibility, please contact: archives@brockport.edu.
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