Data: Diversity-production relationships of fish communities in freshwater stream ecosystems

Ecological relationships between species richness and biomass production
are increasingly thought to be pervasive across the globe. Yet
diversity-production relationships have not been explored extensively for
freshwater fish communities even though fisheries production provides key
services to humans. Our aim was to evaluate the diversity-production
relationship for fish communities inhabiting freshwater streams across the
Appalachian Mountain range and examine how diversity-production
relationships varied across streams possessing different thermal
signatures. Our study area included 25 freshwater stream ecosystems
spanning from Vermont to North Carolina in the United States. Twenty sites
were located in Maryland south to Tennessee and North Carolina while five
additional higher latitude sites were sampled in Massachusetts and Maine.
We sampled 25 study streams from June to September 2012 and collected fish
population information to calculate biomass, species richness, Shannon
diversity index, and annual production for each fish community. Linear
mixed models were used to analyze the relationship between diversity
indices and total community production. We also compared diversity and
production relationships across other taxa. Across all streams, community
fish production, biomass and P/B ratios ranged 0.15-6.79 g m2 y1,
0.61-0.73 g m-2, and 0.21-1.07 y-1, respectively. Species richness had a
significant positive effect (p = 0.012) on community fish production,
while accounting for the thermal signature of the streams as a random
effect and other habitat covariates. Shannon diversity index did not have
a significant effect (p = 0.101) on community production. The
diversity-production relationship observed for stream fish communities was
similar to other studies but demonstrated one of the highest slopes. Our
results demonstrate that effects of biodiversity resonate to influence the
production of fishes; thus, management of fisheries is more closely
coupled to biodiversity than previously thought.