Fish assemblage responses to forest cover.

We investigated whether fish assemblage structure in southern Appalachian streams differed with historical and contemporary forest cover. We compared fish assemblages in 2(nd)-4(th) order streams draining watersheds that had increased forest cover between 1950 and 1993 (i.e.

The land-cover cascade: relationships coupling land and water.

We introduce the land-cover cascade (LCC) as a conceptual framework to quantify the transfer of land-cover-disturbance effects to stream biota. We hypothesize that disturbance is propagated through multivariate systems through key variables that transform a disturbance and pass a reorganized disturbance effect to the next hierarchical level where the process repeats until ultimately affecting biota. We measured 31 hydrologic, geomorphic, erosional, and substrate variables and 26 biotic responses that have been associated with land-use disturbance in third- and fourth-order streams in the Blue Ridge physiographic province in western North Carolina (USA).