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An integrated exploratory approach to examining the relationships of environmental stressors and fish responses

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Journal of Aquatic Ecosystem Stress and Recovery

Abstract

The Chesapeake Bay is one of the mostproductive systems in the world. It is theNation's largest estuary (64,000 square miles)and is home to about 13 million people. Itsupports a variety of aquatic resources offlora and fauna. However, for the past 350years and especially in the last two to threedecades, there has been substantialdeterioration of the natural resources. Manyspecies of submerged aquatic vegetation andbenthic invertebrates have been diminished orbecome extinct. Commercial harvests of fish,crab and shell fish have also declined.

In 1983, a Chesapeake Bay Agreement was signedby Pennsylvania, Maryland, the District ofColumbia, Virginia and the Bay Commission. Itwas subsequently amended in 1987 and 1992. TheAgreement identified the improvement andmaintenance of water quality as the mostcritical elements in the overall restorationand protection of the Chesapeake Bay. In orderto restore the Bay area and to conserve thefish resources, the causal relationshipsbetween the environmental stressors and thecomposition and health of the fish communitiesmust be understood.

Multivariate ordination techniques are usefulexploratory tools to help elucidate latentenvironmental relationships, define specificbiocriteria and to generate hypotheses. Geographical information systems (GIS) is ananalytical technique for identifying spatialrelationships. In this project, an integratedmethodology involving the use of multivariateordination, statistical, and GIS techniques wasadopted. A non-metric multi-dimensionalscaling (NMDS) ordination technique wasemployed in conjunction with other statisticaltechniques (such as correlation analysis) andArcView GIS to analyze a huge data set from theMaryland Biological Stream Survey (MBSS). Theobjectives were to elucidate the intricaterelationships between a suite of environmentalfactors and fish conditions in the riverinesystem in the Chesapeake Bay and to evaluatethe effectiveness of this approach inexploratory analyses.

The results showed that landuse issignificantly related to nutrient loading. Toa large extent, landuse and nitrates are alsoaffecting the composition and health of thefish communities in some subwatersheds in theChesapeake Bay. It was also found that theapproach adopted in this study is flexible,requiring few model assumptions. But it iscomprehensive and reliable, capable ofrevealing the impacts of environmentalstressors on the ecology, structure,composition and health of the fishcommunities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Exposure Research Laboratory, Ecological Exposure Research Division, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Cincinnati, OH, 45268, U.S.A.;

    Susanna T.Y. Tong

  2. Department of Geography, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0131, U.S.A

    Susanna T.Y. Tong

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Tong, S.T. An integrated exploratory approach to examining the relationships of environmental stressors and fish responses. Journal of Aquatic Ecosystem Stress and Recovery 9, 1–19 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013184311165

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