Evaluating the reproductive success of Arkansas River shiner by assessing early life-history stage dispersal and survival at a landscape level

Reduced to its most fundamental level, the management problem addressed by this project is the basic conflict between the fact that fish need water and the reality that the amount and quality of the water available has been dramatically altered by human activities. For fishes dependent upon specific flows for successful reproduction, the quality and quantity of available water are likely the primary determinants of habitat quality. In many cases, the minimum requirements of water quantity and quality needed to support self-sustaining fish populations are unknown and thus there is no way for resource managers to effectively assess habitat quality and its ability to support fish populations under current or future conditions. The project had two main goals: 1) build a predictive model at the landscape scale to assess the probability of Arkansas River shiner occurrence given a suite of landscape metrics and 2) assess the effects and interactions of environmental factors, e.g., temperature, suspended solids, channel geometry, and flow, on egg buoyancy and early life-history stage survival through laboratory and field experiments. The first goal had one objective- to predict the probability of Arkansas River shiner presence across the entire range under historical and recent environmental conditions and identify significant landscape metrics relating to those distributional changes. The second goal had three objectives- 1) assess the effects of temperature, salinity, and suspended solids on early life stages of Arkansas River shiner, 2) determine the efficiency of the Moore Egg Collector, a gear commonly used to collect drifting eggs of Arkansas River shiner and other members of the pelagic broadcast spawning guild, and 3) assess the influence of stream geomorphology on Arkansas River shiner egg transport.
Several final products have been submitted to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in addition to this final report. The single objective identified in the first project goal was completed and is In Press in Global Change Biology (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12329/pdf). The second project goal had three objectives and the first two objectives were completed prior to this report: Objective one was completed as a Master’s thesis and objective two was completed and published in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management (DOI:10.1080/02755947.2012.741557).