USGS Announces Online Access to Nationwide Fish Community Data
Data on fish communities are now available for 960 stream sites
in more than 50 major river basins across the Nation. More than
1,900 fish community samples, collected from 1993 through 2002
by the National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program, can be
downloaded from http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/data. USGS fish community
samples document the presence of all fish species and their relative
abundances within designated stream reaches.
These fish data are part of the NAWQA Data Warehouse, which also
provides online access to 8 million records of water-quality information,
enabling water-resource managers, scientists, and the public to
find data about the quality of water or chemical concentrations
in aquatic tissue at 4,100 stream sites and 6,500 wells across
the United States.
For more information on fish sampling protocols, please refer
to, "Revised protocols for sampling algal, invertebrate, and
fish communities as part of the National Water-Quality Assessment
Program" at http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/protocols/OFR02-150/
Online access to macroinvertebrate and algae data are anticipated
this spring and summer, respectively.
For questions regarding online data retrievals, please contact
or Sandy Williamson, 253-428-3600, ext. 2683. For technical questions,
such as regarding biological collection methods and taxonomy, please
contact Steve Moulton, email@example.com,
703-648-6874. Additional information about NAWQA ecological studies
also is available at http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/ecology.