Description: This project is fully described in: Riches, M., Gilligan, D., Danaher, K. and Pursey, J. (2016) Fish Communities and Threatened Species Distributions of NSW. Published by the Department of Primary Industries. Fish community data was collected from three years of biological surveys across NSW. Within the framework of the Australian Hydrological Geospatial Fabric V2 surface hydrology network, this was combined with attributes from the National Environmental Stream Attributes Database and River Styles®geomorphology.Generalised Additive Modelling (GAM) was used to predict a fish community status for each river reach.For the majority of estuarine river reaches the fish community values were derived from Roper T, Creese B, Scanes P, Stephens K, Williams R, Dela-Cruz J, Coade G, Coates B & Fraser M 2011, Assessing the condition of estuaries and coastal lake ecosystems in NSW, Monitoring, evaluation and reporting program, Technical report series, Office of Environment and Heritage, Sydney. The fish metrics were very similar but values were for the whole estuary, not river reach.Fish community data was collected from 646 sampling locations within the South-East Coast, Murray-Darling Basin, Bulloo and Lake Eyre Basin drainage divisions of NSW collected between January 2009 and December 2011. Sampling was based on a standardised Sustainable Rivers Audit (SRA) electrofishing and bait-trap protocol. The overall Fish Community Status was derived from three condition indicators – expectedness, nativeness and recruitment.The index was then partitioned into five equal bands to rate the condition of the fish community; “Very Good”, “Good”, “Fair”, “Poor”, or “Very Poor”.The Expectedness Indicator represents the proportion of native species that are now found within NSW, compared to that which was historically present. The Expectedness Indicator is derived from two input metrics; the observed native species richness over the expected species richness at each site, and the total native species richness observed within the zone over the total number of species predicted to have existed within the zone historically. The Nativeness Indicator represents the proportion of native versus alien fishes within the river. The Nativeness Indicator is derived from three input metrics; proportion native biomass, proportion native abundance and proportion native species.The Recruitment Indicator represents the recent reproductive activity of the native fish community within each altitude zone. The Recruitment Indicator is derived from three input metrics; the proportion of native species showing evidence of recruitment at a minimum of one site within a zone, the average proportion of sites within a zone at which each species captured was recruiting, and the average proportion of total abundance of each species that are new recruits.The Australian Hydrological Geospatial Fabric V2 surface hydrology network (Geofabric) is a fully connected and directed stream network based a 9 second DEM. It allocates a unique stream segment number to each river reach in Australia. The Environmental Attributes Database is a set of lookup tables supplying attributes describing the natural and anthropogenic characteristics of the stream and catchment environment that was developed by the Australian National University (ANU) in 2011 and updated in 2012. The data is supplied as part of the supplementary Geofabric products which is associated with the 9 second DEM derived streams and the National Catchment Boundaries based on 250k scale stream network. 30 Stream variables were assessed for the modelling.River Styles®provides a high resolution categorical classification of river character within a nested hierarchy of criteria based on valley setting, channel planform, geomorphic units, and bed material. The NSW Office of Water compiled a spatial dataset of River Styles®classifications for a large number of the waterways of NSW. From 65 River Style®categories we generated two new fields representing Planform (34 categories) and Substratum (8 categories) for each stream segment. River Style®planform and substratum categories were then assigned to each Geofabric segment.Generalised Additive Modelling (GAM) analysis was used to model relationships between the fish assemblage metrics/indicators/index with the environmental and River Style®attributes of stream segments. Only stream segments with a modelled average daily flow of more than five megalitres were selected for output. The predicted values for each river reach were converted from the Geofabric framework to the higher resolution 2013 NSW Strahler Stream Order Hydroline.
Copyright Text: Riches, M., Gilligan, D., Danaher, K. and Pursey, J. (2016) Fish Communities and Threatened Species Distributions of NSW. Published by the Department of Primary Industries.