Effects of Temperature, Flow, and Climate Factors on Inter-annual Variation of Larval Fish Assemblages in a Coastal Watershed PDF Download

Author: Tracy McCulloch
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Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Predicting how populations will respond to future climate scenarios is of interest to ecologists and resource managers. Recent interest in the effect large-scale climate patterns have on local environmental conditions has identified relationships between climate, fish diversity, assemblage structure, abundance, and population fluctuations. I hypothesized that large-scale climate patterns could help explain the inter-annual variation in larval fish assemblage of the lower Roanoke River, North Carolina. Acting through temperature and precipitation, these large-scale climate indices can influence ecosystem response, and therefore should correlate with local weather variables. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO) climate indices are known to influence temperature and precipitation in the North Atlantic Ocean basin and were chosen for their likely influence within the lower Roanoke River. Air temperature and precipitation data from Weldon, NC, and Roanoke Rapids, NC, weather stations were used to form a long-term combined (LTC) dataset from 1904 to 2011 to test their relationship with the large-scale climate indices. Relationships between the LTC, NAO, and AMO showed the winter NAO positively significant with four-month winter (December through March) mean maximum air temperatures (r = 0.41, p