Brook Trout Distribution Modeling in Lake Superior Tributaries: Impacts of Exotic Salmonid Removal

Native brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis), coho salmon (Onchorhynchus kisutch) and steelhead (Onchorhynchus mykiss) within Michigan’s Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore have been the focus of a project designed to evaluate the impact of non-native salmonids on brook trout.  The project has produced several years worth of fish population and habitat data that provides a detailed view of three tributaries of Lake Superior (Sevenmile Creek, Mosquito River and Hurricane River).  We are developing a Geographic Information Systems database that will be modeled and displayed within ArcGIS.  Standard stations in the streams will be georeferenced and this spatial data will be combined with our historical habitat and fish distribution data sets. The resulting database will be explored using HyperNiche to model the effect of changing exotic salmonid density on brook trout habitat use.  These models will be tested during the summer of 2011 by field sampling.