Incorporating fish monitoring into the Waikato Regional Councils' Regional Ecological Monitoring of Streams (REMS) - preliminary results for wadeable streams 2009-2015
Report: TR 2016/29
Author: Bruno David, Callum Bourke, Mark Hamer, Stephen Scothern, Michael Pingram, Michael Lake
About this report
In this report we review preliminary data from the Waikato Regional Council’s State of the Environment (SOE) wadeable rivers fishing programme. Standardized fisheries sampling commenced in 2009 at a number of least impaired reference sites and by 2011/2012 routine fisheries sampling was added to the Councils existing Regional Ecological Monitoring of Streams (REMS) programme. We illustrate the utility of the randomized probabilistic network for reporting on extent estimates of fish metrics by using the FishIBI as an example across the Waikato wadeable river network. As a further component of this report we examine some species specific patterns that appear to be emerging across the region for frequently encountered species like long and shortfin eels and redfin bullies. In brief over this six year period of assessment longfin elvers (<100mm) were rarely captured throughout the network compared to shortfin elvers and there is a tendency for shortfin elvers to be detected at sites that are predominantly or exclusively dominated by larger size classes (>100mm) of longfin eels. Redfin bullies on the other hand appeared to be on average smaller but exhibit greater recruitment potential in streams draining to the east compared to sites draining to the west of the region. In the future it is envisaged that refined fish metrics could be combined with other physical, chemical and ecological components (including invertebrates) to better describe the ‘health’ of individual wadeable river reaches.
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