Draft: Final Report: Analysis of Relationships of Everglades Fish with Hydrology Using Long-Term Databaes from the Everglades National Park

Trexler, Joel; Loftus, William

Report of studies used to gather information needed for management efforts in the Everglades Restudy including documentation of effects on hurricanes and other environmental disturbances; and the interpretation of patterns of wading-bird foraging and nesting; and aquatic-animals. Fishes provide one of the longest, most spatially extensive records of monitoring information about the environmental integrity of wetland habitats in Everglades National Park (ENP). Monitoring offish communities in ENP began in the 1960s, was expanded in the 1970s, and presently includes sampling sites in both Shark and Taylor Sloughs. A standard protocol using the 1m throw trap was developed in the 1970s and has been consistently applied at a number of locations in the Park since late 1977. With funding from the South Florida Management District and the US Army Corps of Engineers, the ENP network was expanded in the 1990s to include more ENP sites and habitats north of the Park in the Water Conservation Areas. The data gathered by this landscape-scale network have provided information critical to a variety of management efforts including: development of performance measures and simulation models to evaluate alternative management plans in the Everglades Restudy; documentation of effects of hurricanes and other environmental disturbances; and interpretation of patterns of wading-bird foraging and nesting. In this report, we provide a history of the aquatic-animal research effort, and we describe the results of our analyses of long-term data (1978 through 1999) collected by throw trap from three of the study sites.