Impacts of Hydrological Restoration on Three Estuarine Communities of the Southwest Florida Coast and on Associated Animal Inhabitants

This project sought to characterize habitat relationships between selected faunal groups and their mangrove environment on the Southwest Florida coast. We described how mangrove associated fish species are distributed in fringing forest habitat along a salinity gradient in the tidal portions of the Shark River; the ecology and population dynamics of diamondback terrapins in the Big Sable Creek complex; experimentally determined the preferred habitat of the specialist fish Rivulus marmoratus via field and laboratory experiments; and how the conversion of mangrove forests to intertidal mud flats in the Big Sable Creek complex has affected fish composition and use of those habitats.

The overall strategy was to collect robust empirical field data on forage fish distribution and abundance that can serve multiple purposes: as performance measures in restoration assessment; as the beginning of a long-term dataset analogous to three very powerful datasets from other locales in the Greater Everglades Ecosystem: 15-20 yr from freshwater marshes, 10 yr from the mangrove ecotone of Taylor Slough and adjacent tidal creeks, and 10-12 yr from Florida Bay; and contribute to the basic ecological understanding of mangrove-associated fishes.