The response of fish assemblages to changes in protection status is a major issue for both biodiversity conservation and fishery management. In New Caledonia, the Aboré reef marine reserve harbours more than 500 fish species, and has been subjected to changes in protection status since 1988. The present study investigates the impact of these changes on a wide subset of species (213), based on u...

Monitoring fish assemblages is needed to assess whether Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are meeting their conservation and fisheries management goals, as it allows one to track the progress of recovery of exploited species and associated communities. Underwater Visual Census techniques (UVC) are used to monitor fish assemblages in MPAs. UVCs should be adapted to fish abundance, body-size and beha...

We sampled the demersal fish community of the Bonney Canyon, South Australia at depths (100-1,500 m) and locations that are poorly known. Seventy-eight species of demersal fish were obtained from 12 depth-stratified trawls along, and to either side, of the central canyon axis. Distributional patterns in species richness and biomass were highly correlated. Three fish assemblage groupings, charac...

Debates about the importance of marsh resources to prehistoric hwnan subsistence in the western Great Basin are longstanding. Recent questions regarding the natural vs.cultural origin offISh remains in lakeside archaeological sitesjllrther impede understanding of ancient subsistence patterns. Taphonamic study of a huge assemblage of tui chub (Gila bicolor) remains from an archaeological site in...

Balancing aquatic conservation and water supply is becoming a major global issue for urban landscapes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ecological effects of stream-flow alterations via water withdrawals and impoundments on fish assemblage structure. Electric fishing data were collected at 33 wadeable streams in Connecticut, located in the Southern New England region of USA. Fish s...

—Three oxbow lakes with different connection frequencies and an adjacent reach of the middle Brazos River, Texas, were surveyed quarterly from summer 1993 to summer 1996 to examine the effects of hydrology and physicochemical attributes on fish assemblage structure. During flood events, oxbows usually were colonized by about 20 fish species from the river channel, and several fluvial specialist...

The hypothesis of convergence takes the deterministic view that community (or assemblage) structure can be predicted from the environment, and that the environment is expected to drive evolution in a predictable direction. Here we present results of a comparative study of freshwater fish assemblages from headwater streams in four continents (Europe, North America, Africa and South America), wit...

INTRODUCTION The global connectedness of ecological systems and ecological problems is becoming ever more apparent, as are the associated complexities. As a result, effective large-scale conservation is relying more on regional modeling and assessment. These regional approaches allow for evaluation of resource conditions over large areas and often have multiscale capabilities allowing examinati...

We investigated whether fish assemblage structure in southern Appalachian streams differed with historical and contemporary forest cover. We compared fish assemblages in 2(nd)-4(th) order streams draining watersheds that had increased forest cover between 1950 and 1993 (i.e., reforesting watersheds). We sampled fish in 50 m reaches during August 2001 and calculated catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) ...

Karst spring systems provide permanent water sources in semi-arid to arid environments, supporting a diverse aquatic community. Numerous karst streams in the Edwards Plateau and Trans-Pecos regions of Texas support two distinct fish assemblages, spring-associated species and riverine species. Previous studies have identified constant water temperature as the segregating factor but have lacked t...