Temporal and Spatial Trends in the Frequency of Occurrence, Length-Frequency Distributions, Length-Weight Relationships, and Relative Abundance of Upper Mississippi River Fish

摘要

This report focuses on fisheries information collected by the Long Term Resource Monitoring Program (LTRMP) in 1993-2002. In 10 years of sampling, more than 24,000 fish community samples from six study areas in the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS) were collected for the LTRMP. More than three million individual fish composing 136 species were collected. Data gathered from this extensive effort were used to address the following four questions: (1) What fish species are present in the UMRS and how are species distributed within the basin; (2) What is the size structure of commercially and recreationally important species and does size structure vary within the system; (3) How does the physical condition of species vary from year to year and spatially within the system; and (4) In what way does the abundance of species within the system vary temporally and spatially. These topics were chosen because they take advantage of the extensive temporal and spatial characteristics of the LTRMP fisheries database and address important management oriented questions not easily answered with short term or local scale research.