Flow-Sediment-Biota Relations: Implications for River Regulation Effects on Native Fish Abundance
Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Ecological Applications
Volume
12
Issue
6
Publisher
Ecological Society of America
Publication Date
2002
First Page
1719
Last Page
1739
Abstract
Alteration of natural flow regimes by river regulation affects fish distribution and assemblage structure, but causative pathways are not always direct and may go unrecognized. The Colorado River population of the endangered Colorado pikeminnow, Ptychocheilus lucius, suffers from low rates of recruitment and reduced carrying capacity. We hypothesized that availability of prey fish for this large-bodied native piscivore may, in part, be limited by reduced standing crops of periphyton and macroinvertebrates resulting from accumulation of fine sediment in the riverbed. We stratified the 373-km-long study area into 11 strata and sampled various physical and biological parameters in runs and riffles of three randomly selected 1- to 3-km-long study reaches in each stratum during base flows of spring and fall 1994–1995. Significant correlations were found between biomass of both chlorophyll a and macroinvertebrates and various physical metrics that described the degree of fine sediment accumulation in gravel–cobble substrates. Riffles were relatively free of fine sediment throughout the study area, but substrates of runs contained progressively more fine sediments with distance downstream. There was a corresponding longitudinal change in biota along the river continuum with greatest biomass of fish, invertebrates, and periphyton upstream. Adult pikeminnow were concentrated in upstream strata where potential prey fishes were most abundant. We suggest that fine-sediment effects on biota have increased in recent years as a result of river regulation. Historically, spring snowmelt frequently produced flows with magnitudes sufficient to mobilize the bed and winnow silt and sand from coarse substrates. Following regulation, the mean recurrence interval of such flows lengthened from 1.3–2.7 yr (depending on the stratum) to 2.7–13.5 yr, extending the duration of fine sediment accumulation and potentially depressing biotic production. Our results describe and help explain the spatial distribution of the Colorado River fish community and establish a link between flow, sediment, and the riverine food web supporting the community's top predator. To maintain intact native fish communities in this and other river basins, managers need to identify functional aspects of the natural hydrograph and incorporate these findings into river restoration efforts.
Recommended Citation
Osmundson DB, Ryel RJ, Lamarra VL, Pitlick J (2002) Flow-sediment-biota relations: implications for river regulation effects on native fish abundance. Ecological Applications 12:1719-1739.
Comments
Copyright by The Ecological Society of America. Publisher's PDF and HTML fulltext available through remote link.