Neches and Sabine River Basin Fish and Environmental Datasets

Freshwater fishes provide numerous ecosystem goods and services to people, such as provisioning services (food, recreational opportunities), information services (indicator species information), and cultural services (conservation values). Consequently, knowledge of fish species distributions and abundances, as well as information about how these have changed over time, is critical to natural resource management and stewardship. The data included in this dataset were collected with funding from the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts Natural Resources Program and focused on the mission to provide data for species status assessments by providing comprehensive evaluations of the freshwater stream fish abundances and distributions in the Neches River basin and upper Sabine River basin in east Texas. Fish assemblages were surveyed using electrofishing and seining across 286 surveys resulting in 137,823 individuals collected. Specimens collected were sorted and deposited into the Collection of Fishes in the Biodiversity Research and Teaching Collections at Texas A&M University are also freely available for loan (https://agrilife.org/tcwc/collections/ichthyology/). Environmental data were also collected from the same locations at the same time as fishes, including assessments of water depth, water velocity, substrate composition, channel characteristics, and riparian characteristics.