Associations between Watershed Characteristics and Angling Success for Sport Fishes in Mississippi Wadeable Streams

—We developed and evaluated multiple linear regression models to describe the associations between watershed land use and geomorphology and angling success (catch per unit effort [CPUE; fish/h]) for sport fishes in wadeable streams in Mississippi. The mean angler CPUE for all species combined, sunfishes Lepomis spp., and black bass Micropterus spp. was strongly and positively associated with the percentage of forest cover, stream density, total road density, and primary highway density. The mean angler CPUE of largemouth bass M. salmoides and longear sunfish L. megalotis was negatively associated with the percentage of agricultural land but positively associated with rural road density. The mean CPUE of spotted bass M. punctulatus was negatively associated with elevation and the number of road crossings in the watershed but positively associated with rural road density. Model validation procedures revealed that the prediction errors were relatively large, so that the ability to predict mean angler CPUE from individual streams was low for all models. However, the species group models were precise, explaining 83, 71, and 80%, respectively, of the variation in the mean CPUE for all species, sunfishes, and black bass from an independent data set. In contrast, the species-specific models were relatively imprecise, explaining less than 33% of the variation in the mean CPUE in the independent data. We advocate a landscape-level management perspective—in concert with more traditional assessments of water quality and biological integrity—to address the connection between sport fishing and conservation in wadeable streams in Mississippi. In the southeastern United States, warmwater coastal plain streams that are characterized as wadeable (Strahler stream orders 1–5; average depth ,1 m) typically support sport fisheries for black bass (primarily largemouth bass Micropterus salmoides and spotted bass M. punctulatus), sunfishes Lepomis spp., and channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus (Jackson 2004; Shewmake and Jackson 2004; Alford and Jackson 2006). In contrast, smallmouth bass M. dolomieu tend to dominate the sport fisheries in more highland warmwater streams (Reed and Rabeni 1989; White 1996; Fisher and Burroughs 2003). By comparison with the sport fisheries in highland streams, those in coastal plain streams receive very limited, if any, management attention (Schramm et al. 1996; Fisher et