We've worked on a number of fish population monitoring and assessment projects. Different habitats are incorporated in this research that has different lakescape and landscape scales. Below are some of the current projects...
- For the past four years we have been using standardized netting protocols for depth stratified randomized sampling in a set of lake trout and brook trout lakes. This project provides a well-designed survey of fish for modeling distribution, occurrence and abundance for numbers of species but especially lake trout, brook trout, lake whitefish and common sucker. All sets are of short duration to minimize possible mortality due to netting. More on this project soon…
- Multi-pass surveys of stream and lake systems to model the distribution of various small fish species including sculpins, cyprinids, catfish and various young-of-year species.
- Distance sampling underwater in the shallow littoral zone: Distance sampling is a method of estimating abundance based on a probability of detecting an animal as a function of distance from a survey line. We've used this approach in the shallow littoral zone of lakes to estimate the density of cyprinid fish in complex, shallow habitats. In 2007, we returned toScottLakeinAlgonquinParkto resurvey the nearshore fish community using line transect distance sampling. In general, underwater visual count (UVC) methods hold great promise for relatively shallow surveys of fish in their natural habitat - a level of resolution not attainable by indirect passive netting gear. In our work at Harkness, we refer to the "C" in UVC as counts as opposed to census that other researchers use - implying a detection probability of 1.0 in their surveys. Until perfect detection is demonstrated it is more prudent to refer to the data as counts not censuses.
- Hydroacoustic assessment in lakes – counting the coregonids: We have employed two transducer systems to estimate the distribution and abundance of the pelagic fish assemblage in numbers ofAlgonquinParklakes. This is primarily a method for estimating cisco and whitefish abundance in our case. Lake Opeongo receives an annual late summer survey and other lakes are surveyed as part of targeted projects.