Development and use of the Wetland Fish Index to assess the quality of coastal wetlands in the Laurentian Great Lakes

Abstract

Abstract:We use fish and environmental data from 40 wetlands of the Laurentian Great Lakes to develop the Wetland Fish Index (WFI), a tool that can be used to assess the quality of coastal marshes. A partial canonical correspondence analysis was used to ordinate fish species along multidimensional environmental axes that accounted for anthropogenic disturbance based on temperature, conductivity, and the presence of pollutants (e.g., suspended solids and primary nutrients). Compared with other measures of fish habitat quality (e.g., Shannon-Wiener diversity index and species richness), the WFI was the only index that was significantly related to the degree of water quality degradation and wetlands condition, as indicated by an independent index of wetland quality, the Water Quality Index (WQI). WQI ranks sites according to deterioration in water quality and is statistically related to the degree of land-use alteration in wetland watersheds. We demonstrate the usefulness of the WFI for detecting intrawetland variation between two sites in a degraded urban wetland, Frenchman's Bay, Lake Ontario, and to distinguish the heavily impacted wetlands in lower Green Bay from the less-impacted marshes in middle and upper Green Bay, Lake Michigan. This was accomplished by using only published fish data without corresponding environmental variables.Résumé : Nous avons utilisé des données sur les poissons et sur le milieu provenant de 40 terres humides des Grands Lacs laurentiens afin de mettre au point un indice ichtyologique des terres humides (WFI, Wetland Fish Index), un outil qui peut permettre d'évaluer la qualité des marais côtiers. Une analyse partielle des correspondances canoniques a servi à ordonner les espèces de poissons le long d'axes environnementaux multidimensionnels qui expliquent les perturbations anthropiques d'après la température, la conductivité et la présence de polluants (par exemple, de solides en suspension et de nutriments primaires). Par comparaison à d'autres mesures de la qualité de l'habitat des poissons (par exemple, l'indice de diversité de Shannon-Wiener et la richesse spécifique), le WFI est le seul qui soit relié significativement à l'importance de la dégradation de la qualité de l'eau et à l'état des terres humides, tel qu'indiqué par un indice indépendant de la qualité des terres humides, l'indice de qualité de l'eau (WQI, Water Quality Index). Le WQI ordonne les sites d'après la détérioration de la qualité de leur eau et montre une corrélation significative avec les modifications associées à l'utilisation des terres dans le bassin versant des terres humides. Nous montrons l'utilité de WFI pour détecter la variation dans un même système entre deux sites dans Frenchman's Bay, lac Ontario, une terre humide urbaine et dégradée; il peut aussi distinguer les terres humides fortement modifiées de la partie inférieure de Green Bay. lac Michigan, des régions moins affectées des parties moyennes et supérieures de la baie. Cela a pu être réalisé à partir seulement des données publiées sur les poiss...

Standardized Measures of Coastal Wetland Condition: Implementation at a Laurentian Great Lakes Basin-Wide Scale

“…This approach relied on inferring that measurable biotic community attributes are responses to varying levels of anthropogenic disturbance. Since the 1980s, numerous organism-based indicators have been developed or evaluated for several Great Lakes ecosystem types, including coastal wetlands (Burton et al 1999;Herman et al 2001;Simon et al 2001;Wilcox et al 2002;Lougheed and Chow-Fraser 2002;Uzarski et al 2004Uzarski et al , 2005Uzarski et al , 2014Chow-Fraser 2006;Seilheimer and Chow-Fraser 2006;Albert et al 2007;Croft and Chow-Fraser 2007;Howe et al 2007a, b;Niemi et al 2007;Martínez-Crego et al 2010;Grabas et al 2012;Calabro et al 2013;Chin et al 2015). These indicators have been calibrated against both water chemistry attributes and anthropogenic land-use gradients to relate specific biological community characteristics to anthropogenic disturbances across the Great Lakes basin.…”

Development of ecological indicators for the U.S. Great Lakes coastal region – A summary of applications in Lake Huron

“…Results from GLEI were intended to supplement and complement on-going efforts in indicator development within the Great Lakes region (e.g. Bertram and Stadler-Salt, 1998;Lawson, 2004;Environment Canada and U.S. EPA, 2005;Seilheimer and Chow-Fraser, 2006).…”

Fish Species Composition, Distribution and Abundance in Shadegan Wetland

“…Fish are a suitable group of organisms for monitoring aquatic condition because they have a documented relationship with environmental perturbations (i.e., increased trophic status and degraded fish community). Variation in environmental condition cause changes in the fish community and those changes can then be extracted into ecological indicators to quantify environmental impacts [19]. For best results, we recommend consistent sampling gear and fishing effort be used when collecting fish data for use with the WFI.…”

“…To develop the WFI, each species was assigned U and T values according to the following equation [19].…”

“…CANOCO 4.5 [19] was used to run canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) as in Seilheimer and Chow-Fraser [19,20]. Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) was used to explore the distribution of the fish communities in relation to the environmental variables.…”