Riverine ‘Fish-Dominated' Food Webs along an Urban to Rural Gradient

Although trophically linking consumers and resources in a community is central to ecology, high quality, spatially-explicit food web data remain scarce.  In river ecosystems, linking food webs to both terrestrial and fluvial landscapes represents an important step in our current understanding of how fish assemblages are regulated.  To this end, we are investigating fish-dominated food webs in a suite of river reaches (1-2 km each) representing forested, agricultural, and urban land uses along the Scioto River, OH, USA.  At each reach, we characterize fish assemblage composition; fish-centered food web structure and energy flows using stable isotopes (C, N, H); and the physical environment at two scales (landscape and riverscape).  We are using these data to develop spatially-explicit models related to the diversity, distribution, and connectivity of fish assemblages in a large, multi-use river ecosystem.