This was the first effort to standardize methods for inland fish sampling across North America and, as such, was a joint effort contributed to by a large group of talented and dedicated individuals, in addition to the authors and coeditors. While these sampling methods were primarily developed for North America, most could be used with little or no modification in other areas of the world. Those involved with standard sampling efforts in North America would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with scientists from other regions to develop methods to share data worldwide.
"The book covers fishery assessments, habitat and community manipulations, and common practices for managing stream, river, lake, and anadromous fisheries. Chapters on history; ecosystem management; management processes; communications with the public; introduced, undesirable, and endangered species; and the legal and regulatory frameworks provide the context for modern fisheries management." From fisheries.org.
Abstract: Habitat is now the basis of most impact assessments and resource inventories, and it is the basis of many species management plans, mitigation planning, and environmental regulation. Habitats are relatively stable through time, easily defined in intuitive physical terms, and provide a tangible resource for negotiations and decision making. Numerous and varied methods of analyzing and reporting habitat conditions have been developed by federal, state, provincial, and private agencies. Habitat assessment approaches vary greatly among regions of the continent. The great variability in methods and an unusually wide range of practices have impeded the ability of agencies to share and synthesize information. A diversity of methods is desirable in the initial stages of a rapidly developing field, but enough time has passed to assess the state-of-knowledge and identify the best of the currently used methods and techniques. This manual is intended to provide fisheries biologists with a limited set of techniques for obtaining aquatic habitat data. The manual also describes the range of information collected and used in agency habitat analyses. Agencies planning habitat programs should review the synthesis of established and documented methods being used in North America (Appendix 1) and the planning recommendations in Chapter 2. Then, the remaining chapters should be reviewed to determine what types of habitat data should be included in the agency's program.
The objective of this guide is to help field biologists conduct better surveys of freshwater mussel populations. It opens with a discussion of several considerations and a question that should direct the design of any study of mussel populations. The authors then present sampling designs and methods that may be useful to mussel biologists. The also discuss examples of study designs that address several common objectives of studies of mussel populations.
This book is designed as both a reference and a handbook for the study of fishes. It is a source of methods commonly used to research fish genetics, systematics, anatomy, physiology, developmental biology, toxicology, behavior, and ecology. Standard methods and their theoretical framework are presented for all these fields. Each of the book's 20 chapters also contains a background literature review which, though not exhaustive, allows readers to delve more deeply into subjects that particularly interest them. The main emphasis is on methodology, but the pros and cons of alternative procedures also are treated, as are the uses and misuses of data generated by the techniques.
This report provides species accounts for all known nonindigenous fishes in inland, open waters of the United States on record at the U.S. Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division's laboratory in Gainesville, Florida (USGS/BRD-G). Online access to the dataset is available on the Internet at http://nas.er.usgs.gov.
