An archive of the fish and inveterate data from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) juvenile fin-fish survey across 6 Rhode Island salt ponds from 2010-2015 (NCEI Accession 0291929)

Acquisition Description:
Fish and invertebrate surveys:
The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) provided us with the fish and invertebrate survey data for this study. Beginning in 2010, RIDEM established permanent monitoring stations throughout all six coastal ponds (points on Fig. 1A of Yeager et al., 2020). Communities were sampled monthly from May to October each year via 150 ft beach seine net. Fish and macroinvertebrate individuals were counted, measured, and identified to species. Communities were composed of fishes and invertebrates from multiple trophic levels. Across all ponds, species richness ranged from and 11 to 39 and trophic level ranged from 2.01 – 4.65 (Appendix S1 of Yeager et al., 2020). For the community analysis, we examined species and their abundances averaged across sampling stations to account for dependence within each pond and averaged across months to account for seasonal differences of species presence. To ensure even community sampling across ponds which varied in number of sampling stations, we conducted a species rarefaction test, examining both the rarefaction curves as well as the relationship between the rarefied and observed number of species (Appendix S2 of Yeager et al., 2020).