A Recreational Fishery Quality Index (FQI) foR U.S.A. Streams and Rivers
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Sport fishing is an important recreational and economic activity, especially in Australia, Europe and North America, and the condition of sport fish populations is a key ecological indicator of water body condition for millions of anglers as well asand the concerned public. Despite its importance as an ecological indicator representing the status of sport fish populations, an index for measuring this ecosystem service has not been quantified by analyzing actual fish taxa, size and abundance data across the U.S.A. Therefore, we used game fish data collected from 1,561 stream and river sites located throughout the conterminous U.S.A. combined with specific fish species and size dollar values to calculate a site-specific fishery quality index (FQI) scores for each of the sites. We then regressed those scores against 38 potential site-specific environmental predictor variables, as well as site-specific fish assemblage condition (multimetric index; MMI) scores based on entire fish assemblages, to determine the factors most associated with the FQI scores. We tabulated the results for the entire conterminous U.S.A. as well as for each of nine ecoregions. We found weak correlations between FQI and MMI scores and weak to moderate correlations with environmental variables, which varied in importance with each of 9 ecoregions. We conclude that an FQI is a useful indicator of a stream ecosystem service that may be more understandable by, and of greater concern to, the USA public than more commonly used ecologically driven MMIs.