Defining depth requirements to conserve fish assemblages from water take in an intermittent river

Abstract

River systems once safeguarded from water development are being developed. This includes intermittent rivers that annually dry to a series of pools. Describing fish species relationships between abundance and pool depth can help managers set water-take rules that protect fish in dry-season pools. We sampled fish in main-channel and floodplain pools that spanned a gradient of depths and overcame sampling challenges by accounting for interacting effects of species mean length, environmental attributes, and sampling attributes on fish capture probabilities. Fish abundance-depth relationships varied systematically with species mean length, mesohabitat type (main channel, floodplain), water turbidity, and structural complexity, highlighting system complexity and the potential generality of abundance-depth relationships. Similarly, fish length moderated the effects of environmental attributes on capture probability for all sampling methods. We evaluated impacts of hypothetical water-take regulations on fish species’ distributions. Results suggested that water-take rules prohibiting draining of main-channel pools below 1.65 m and reducing floodplain pools by no more than 14% minimises impacts to species’ distributions, promoting conservation of the fish community. Additionally, our approach demonstrates the capacity of species length for predicting distributional and sampling patterns of fish species.