The effect of four environmental parameters on the structure of estuarine shoreline communities in Texas, USA

Abstract

We modeled 25 years of overdispersed coastal fishery monitoring data with zero‐inflated negative binomial regression to determine the effect size of four environmental parameters—temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity—for 64 species of shoreline fishes, shrimps and crabs. Each parameter exhibited positive, negligible or negative effects on the abundance of various species. Surprisingly, there were a substantial number of species with negligible effects. It is these unaffected species that dominate the estuarine macroconsumer shoreline community of the Texas coast.