Application and testing of a procedure to evaluate transferability of habitat suitability criteria

Abstract

A procedure designed to test the transferability of habitat suitability criteria was evaluated in the Cache la Poudre River, Colorado. Habitat suitability criteria were developed for active adult and juvenile rainbow trout in the South Platte River, Colorado. These criteria were tested by comparing microhabitat use predicted from the criteria with observed microhabitat use by adult rainbow trout in the Cache la Poudre River. A one-sided x2 test, using counts of occupied and unoccupied cells in each suitability classification, was used to test for non-random selection for optimum habitat use over usable habitat and for suitable over unsuitable habitat. Criteria for adult rainbow trout were judged to be transferable to the Cache la Poudre River, but juvenile criteria (applied to adults) were not transferable. Random subsampling of occupied and unoccupied cells was conducted to determine the effect of sample size on the reliability of the test procedure. The incidence of type I and type I1 errors increased rapidly as the sample size was reduced below 55 occupied and 200 unoccupied cells. Recommended modifications to the procedure included the adoption of a systematic or randomized sampling design and direct measurement of microhabitat variables. With these modifications, the procedure is economical, simple and reliable. Use of the procedure as a quality assurance device in routine applications of the instream flow incremental methodology was encouraged. KEY WORDS Instream flow incremental methodology PHABSIM Habitat suitability criteria Transferability

Application of the physical habitat simulation for fish species to assess environmental flows in an Atlantic Forest Stream in South-eastern Brazil

“…Muñoz-Mas et al, 2014a) or a transferability test (e.g. Thomas & Bovee, 1993) should be followed in that case. However, for an effective application, other issues should be considered, for instance: season (specially the dry season), mean water temperature, hydraulic gradient, dominant types of substrate and species composition.…”

An IFIM Experience in the Toyogawa-River Japan

“…These, so called "site-dependent" HSCs are, however, of course all somewhat different for different occasions even for the same species and same site. The differences persist even though they are verified at each site using the Thomas-Bovee (1993) method.…”

Transferability of Monitoring Data from Neighboring Streams in a Physical Habitat Simulation

“…The improved GHSCs use the arithmetic means of the HSCs of neighboring streams constructed by using data in a suitable range. The suitable range, the concept of which was proposed by Thomas and Bovee [26], is the range containing the central 95% of the occupied locations in the HSC.…”

“…The optimum range is the interval containing the central 50% of the occupied locations in the HSC [26]. The suitable and optimum ranges of the Dal River data are shadowed by black and red, respectively, in the figure.…”

“…The similarity of HSCs between the study stream and neighboring streams has been studied by many researchers [18,23,25,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. However, the impact of using such data from neighboring streams has rarely been investigated and a general and efficient solution to this problem has never been proposed.…”