Skip to main content
2023 ESA Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Back

Contributed Talk

Session: : Aquatic Ecology: Streams And Rivers 1

COS 94-1 - Multidecadal effects of climate and land-use change on stream fish communities in the southeastern US

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
1:30 PM – 1:45 PM PDT
Location: B111
Abstract: The southeastern US is a temperate hotspot for aquatic biodiversity. Climate change and land-use change are driving changes in stream temperature and flow regimes, threatening the freshwater biota of this biologically important region. Changes in stream temperature and flow has the potential to mediate yet another important stressor: species invasions. However, linkages and mechanisms underlying changes in temperature and flow, species invasions, and impacts to native biological communities have received relatively little research attention and are therefore not fully understood. To bridge this knowledge gap, we investigated the effect of climate and land-cover change on fish invasions and their impacts on native fish in the Tennessee river basin in the past three decades. We compiled and analyzed repeated fish community surveys over hundreds of stream reaches from federal and state agencies and leveraged recent hydrologic models to estimate temperature and flow changes spanning the past ~30 years. Our results revealed imprints of climate and land-use changes on the distributions and temporal trends of nonnative fish. The environmental and biological contexts in which climate and land-use change occurs were also associated with temporal trends in fish communities. Our research will help inform the spatial prioritization of monitoring programs and conservation efforts to mitigate fish species invasions and their impacts on native stream fish.