Spatial Patterns in Fish Assemblages across the National Ecological Observation Network (NEON): The First Six Years

Abstract

The National Ecological Observation Network (NEON) is a thirty-year, open-source, continental-scale ecological observation platform. The objective of the NEON project is to provide data to facilitate the understanding and forecasting of the ecological impacts of anthropogenic change at a continental scale. Fish are sentinel taxa in freshwater systems, and the NEON has been sampling and collecting fish assemblage data at wadable stream sites for six years. One to two NEON wadable stream sites are located in sixteen domains from Alaska to Puerto Rico. The goal of site selection was that sites represent local conditions but with the intention that site data be analyzed at a continental observatory level. Site selection did not include fish assemblage criteria. Without using fish assemblage criteria, anomalies in fish assemblages at the site level may skew the expected spatial patterns of North American stream fish assemblages, thereby hindering change detection in subsequent years. However, if NEON stream sites are representative of the current spatial distributions of North American stream fish assemblages, we could expect to find the most diverse sites in Atlantic drainages and the most depauperate sites in Pacific drainages. Therefore, we calculated the alpha and regional (beta) diversities of wadable stream sites to highlight spatial patterns. As expected, NEON sites followed predictable spatial diversity patterns, which could facilitate future change detection and attribution to changes in environmental drivers, if any.