The Sierra Lakes Inventory Project: Non-Native fish and community composition of lakes and ponds in the Sierra Nevada, California

The Sierra Lakes Inventory Project (SLIP) was a research endeavor that ran from 1995-2002 and has supported research and management of Sierra Nevada aquatic ecosystems and their terrestrial interfaces. We described the physical characteristics of and surveyed aquatic communities for > 8,000 lentic water bodies in the southern Sierra Nevada, including lakes, ponds, marshes, and meadows. We also created digital map layers for these water bodies when such layers did not exist. The original objective of SLIP was to describe impacts of non-native fish on lake communities, but SLIP data has subsequently enabled study of additional ecological issues, including regional amphibian declines and their impacts on communities, and impacts of non-native fish on terrestrial species. In addition, these data are being used to develop fish removal efforts to restore aquatic ecosystems and recover endangered amphibians. The SLIP data is stored in a relational database that collectively describes water bodies (e.g., depth, elevation, location), surveys (conditions, effort), and communities (including approximately 170 fish, amphibian, reptile, benthic macroinvertebrate, and zooplankton taxa).