Salt Marsh Vegetation and Nekton Community Monitoring at William Floyd Estate, Fire Island National Seashore. 2009 Summary Report.

摘要

The Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network (NCBN) is one of 32 networks of parks created by the Inventory and Monitoring Program (I&M Program) of the National Park Service. The I&M Program has two components, 1) to collect baseline ecological inventory datasets and 2) to implement Vital Signs monitoring, a long-term ecological monitoring program, in each of the Network parks. The Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network consists of eight parks linked by geography and shared ecological characteristics along the Northeastern Atlantic Coast. As part of the Vital Signs program, each Network has developed detailed protocols for monitoring a select number of Vital Signs, or ecological indicators. Because the majority of parks in the NCBN are coastal parks, salt marsh monitoring was chosen as a high priority and a protocol was developed for collecting long-term data on salt marsh vegetation and nekton (James-Pirri In Developmenta, b). This annual report summarizes the first year of data collected at William Floyd Estate, Fire Island National Seashore (WIFL) located in New York. Approximately fifty vegetation plots and a subset of pools and ditches were sampled for nekton at three marshes in July and August of 2009. Monitoring data is to be collected at these same marsh sites biennially. Nekton in marsh pools were sampled with a 1m2 aluminum throw trap (Kushlan 1981, Sogard & Able 1991, Raposa and Roman 2001). Nekton in ditches were sampled using ditch nets (James-Pirri et al. 2010) Vegetation was monitored using 1m2 plots and a revised Braun-Blanquet method (Kent and Coker 1992) to estimate percent cover of each vegetation species and non-vegetation cover type within each plot.