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In The News
Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture Stream Survey - New Hampshire
12/1/2008
With help from 5 seasonal employees (hired for EBTJV surveys), we were able to add 174 sites to our fish database, which now contains fish data from almost 1,100 sites. If you include DES (Department of Environmental Services) Biomonitoring data, we have over 1,500 sites to work with. We are still auditing this year's data, but these sites will help fill in some gaps that we had in the central part of the state. Brook trout were found at 120 of the 194 sites sampled this summer (62%). We also targeted some of the small, low elevation, spring fed trout streams in southeastern New Hampshire.
The biggest surprises were two productive brook trout streams in highly developed watersheds (one in Concord and one in Manchester). A strong groundwater influence on a stream appears to buffer against the impacts of urbanization that would normally extirpate trout from a stream. There is also evidence of this in a recent paper out of Maryland (Stranko et al., 2008, Brook trout declines with land cover and temperature changes in Maryland). We are hoping to use our data to develop a model that will predict the presence or absence of brook trout at a site (or stream watershed catchment) based on landscape characteristics. For more information please contact Matthew Carpenter, Fisheries Biologist at (603) 271-2501.
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