Brief floodplain inundation provides growth and survival benefits to a young-of-year fish in an intermittent river threatened by water development.

Riverine floodplains are highly productive habitats that often act as nurseries for fish but are threatened by flow regulation. The Fitzroy River in northern Australia is facing development, but uncertainty exists regarding the extent to which floodplain habitats deliver benefits to fish, particularly given the brevity of seasonal floodplain inundation. We investigated the growth rate of young-of-year bony bream (Nematalosa erebi) in main channel and ephemeral floodplain habitats using age derived from otolith daily increments.

Multi-scale characterisation of stream nutrient and carbon dynamics in sandy near coastal catchments of south-western Australia.

Managers tasked with repairing degraded stream ecosystems require restoration strategies that are tailored to local and regional characteristics. Emerging evidence suggests that local reach-scale approaches may be as effective, if not more so, than catchment-scale actions in highly permeable coastal landscapes, particularly if there is hydraulic connectivity to shallow groundwater and where recharge is strongly seasonal. This study assessed the relative influence of catchment-scale land use and reach-scale vegetation structure on the distribution of carbon and nutrient concentrations of streams within urban and agricultural catchments of the Perth region of south-western Australia.

Hierarchical multi-taxa models inform riparian vs. hydrologic restoration of urban streams in a permeable landscape.

The degradation of streams caused by urbanization tends to follow predictable patterns; however, there is a growing appreciation for heterogeneity in stream response to urbanization due to the local geoclimatic context. Furthermore, there is building evidence that streams in mildly sloped, permeable landscapes respond uncharacteristically to urban stress calling for a more nuanced approach to restoration. We evaluated the relative influence of local-scale riparian characteristics and catchment-scale imperviousness on the macroinvertebrate assemblages of streams in the flat, permeable urban landscape of Perth, Western Australia.

Occupancy models for monitoring marine fish: a bayesian hierarchical approach to model imperfect detection with a novel gear combination.

Occupancy models using incidence data collected repeatedly at sites across the range of a population are increasingly employed to infer patterns and processes influencing population distribution and dynamics. While such work is common in terrestrial systems, fewer examples exist in marine applications. This disparity likely exists because the replicate samples required by these models to account for imperfect detection are often impractical to obtain when surveying aquatic organisms, particularly fishes.

Species-specific responses of developing anurans to coal combustion wastes.

Field surveys and field experiments have previously documented adverse effects of solid byproducts from coal incineration (coal combustion wastes (CCW)) on larval amphibians inhabiting aquatic habitats. However, a definitive link between CCW-exposure and developmental abnormalities has not been established because no studies have addressed the direct effects of prolonged exposure to CCW on larval amphibian development under controlled laboratory conditions. In the laboratory we exposed green frog (Rana clamitans) and wood frog (Rana sylvatica) larvae to either clean sand or CCW-contaminated sediment to investigate the direct effects of CCW exposure on trace element accumulation, growth, developmental rate, malformations, survival, and metamorphic success.