Overview of Long-Term Fish Monitoring on the Upper Mississippi River System: The First 20-Years

The Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS) provides habitat to a wide array of fish and wildlife species distributed among a complex assortment of habitats.  Approximately one-fifth of the entire North American freshwater fish fauna is native to the UMRS basin. In ecosystems as diverse and complex as the UMRS, many processes and their interrelationships are not well known.  Long-term monitoring is perhaps the most effective means—and in some cases, the only means—by which large, complex ecosystems such as the UMRS can be studied and managed.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Upper Mississippi River Restoration program’s Long Term Resource Monitoring (LTRM) element is a multiagency partnership that has been monitoring fishes in the UMRS for over two decades, using scientific and highly standardized methods.  Fisheries data are used to quantify the status and trends of fish populations and communities, identify relations with various other ecological attributes, assess efficiencies and redundancies in the monitoring methods used, and address fisheries management concerns in a multiuse, large-river resource.  We will briefly touch on the LTRM’s fisheries monitoring design, data uses, and information sharing for one of the world’s largest and most extensive datasets on a large river.