Find research datasets worth reusing

opencc-zeroMay 2020View details →

Trophic structure and mercury transfer in the subarctic fish community of Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada

In recent decades, mercury concentrations have increased in fish of Great Slave Lake (GSL), a subarctic great lake in northern Canada with important recreational, subsistence, and commercial fisheries. This study characterized habitat use and trophic position of common fish species in GSL near the City of Yellowknife (Northwest Territories, Canada), measured mercury concentrations in water and in taxa from lower trophic levels of the food web, and examined trophic and biological influences on mercury concentrations within and among fish species. Northern pike (Exos lucius) and lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeformis) fed predominantly nearshore, cisco (Coregonus artedi) and longnose sucker (Catostomus catostomus) fed predominantly offshore, and burbot (Lota lota) fed roughly equally in both habitats. Habitat-specific feeding did not influence mercury bioaccumulation in fish, in contrast with published studies of smaller lakes. Water concentrations of total mercury and methylmercury were low and showed little spatial variation among sites or depths. Zooplankton (>200 µm) had similarly low methylmercury concentrations to littoral and profundal amphipods, suggesting little habitat-variation of mercury exposure near the base of the food web. Age, size, and trophic position were significant explanatory variables for muscle total mercury concentrations within populations of fish species. Among fish species, size and trophic position explained 80% of the variation in muscle total mercury concentrations. This study generated the most comprehensive dataset to date on mercury bioaccumulation in the food web of GSL, which will serve as a baseline for future studies of this great lake.

opencc-zeroMay 2021View details →

Data from: Fluid preservation causes minimal reduction of parasite detectability in fish specimens: a new approach for reconstructing parasite communities of the past?

<ol> <li>Long-term datasets are needed to evaluate temporal patterns in wildlife disease burdens, but historical data on parasite abundance are extremely rare. For more than a century, natural history collections have been accumulating fluid-preserved specimens, which should contain the parasites infecting the host at the time of its preservation. However, before this unique data source can be exploited, we must identify the artefacts that are introduced by the preservation process. Here, we experimentally address whether the preservation process alters the degree to which metazoan parasites are detectable in fluid-preserved fish specimens when using visual parasite detection techniques.</li> <li>We randomly assigned fish of three species (Gadus chalcogrammus, Thaleichthys pacificus, Parophrys vetulus) to two treatments. In the first treatment, fish were preserved according to the standard procedures used in ichthyological collections. Immediately after the fluid-preservation process was complete, we performed parasitological dissection on those specimens. The second treatment was a control, in which fish were dissected without being subjected to the fluid-preservation process. We compared parasite abundance between the two treatments.</li> <li>Across 298 fish individuals and 59 host–parasite pairs, we found few differences between treatments, with 24 of 27 host–parasite pairs equally abundant between the two treatments. Of these, one pair was significantly more abundant in the preservation treatment than in the control group, and two pairs were significantly less abundant in the preservation treatment than in the control group.</li> <li>Our data suggest that the fluid-preservation process does not have a substantial effect on the detectability of metazoan parasites. This study addresses only the effects of the fixation and preservation process; long-term experiments are needed to address whether parasite detectability remains unchanged in the months, years, and decades of storage following preservation. If so, ecologists will be able to reconstruct novel, long-term datasets on parasite diversity and abundance over the past century or more using fluid-preserved specimens from natural history collections.</li> </ol>

opencc-zeroJan 2020View details →

Data from: Disturbance-mediated consumer assemblages determine fish community structure and moderate top-down influences through bottom-up constraints

<ol> <li>Disturbance is a strong structuring force that can influence the strength of species interactions at all trophic levels, but controls on the contributions to community structure of top-down and bottom-up processes across such gradients remain poorly understood. Changes in the composition of predator and consumer assemblages, and their associated traits, across gradients of environmental harshness (e.g., flooding) are likely to be a particularly important influence on the strength of top-down control and may drive bottom-up constraints.</li> <li>We examined how consumers with particular traits, and the predators that consumed them, varied across a gradient of stream flooding disturbance and used experiments to assess the predation impact on those contrasting consumer communities (ultimately quantifying how flood disturbance altered the strength of top-down control).</li> <li>Consumer community composition and mobility were strongly related to flood disturbance; the biomass and drift of protected primary consumers (i.e., those with morphological defences) decreased with increasing flood disturbance. Predatory fish species had different disturbance niches, and path analysis identified that both direct flood-disturbance effects and indirect bottom-up constraints of flood-disturbance on consumers influenced predatory fish composition and biomass. Fishes generally fed most effectively on consumer types associated with their particular niche, but all fishes were strongly size-selective when feeding on protected consumers. Although protected consumers did not grow large enough to escape predation, an in situ experiment showed protected consumers were at a reduced risk of predation as disturbance increased compared to unprotected consumers.</li> <li>Overall, top-down control declined with flood disturbance, but the effect depended on consumer traits. Predatory fishes were only capable of exerting top-down control on protected consumers in benign habitats but impacted unprotected consumers across a larger range of the disturbance gradient. Collectively our findings suggest that a shift towards a more disturbed state will probably result in reduced predator impacts and a weakening of top-down control. Moreover, predicted increases in the frequency and intensity of climatic events causing disturbance, such as flooding, are likely to result in a community shift that disproportionately impacts protected consumers and the predators that utilise them as prey through the subsequent bottom-up constraints.</li> </ol>

opencc-zeroJan 2020View details →

Common barriers, but temporal dissonance: genomic tests suggest ecological and paleo-landscape sieves structure a coastal riverine fish community

Assessments of spatial and temporal congruency across taxa from genetic data provide insights into the extent to which similar processes structure communities. However, for coastal regions that are affected continuously by cyclical sea-level changes over the Pleistocene, congruent interspecific response will not only depend upon co-distributions, but also on similar dispersal histories among taxa. Here, we use SNPs to test for concordant genetic structure among four co-distributed taxa of freshwater fishes (Teleostei: Characidae) along the Brazilian Atlantic coastal drainages. Based on population relationships and hierarchical genetic structure analyses, we identify all taxa share the same geographic structure suggesting the fish utilized common passages in the past to move between river basins. In contrast to this strong spatial concordance, model-based estimates of divergence times indicate that despite common routes for dispersal, these passages were traversed by each of the taxa at different times resulting in varying degrees of genetic differentiation across barriers with most divergences dating to the Upper Pleistocene, even when accounting for divergence with gene flow. Interestingly, when this temporal dissonance is viewed through the lens of the species-specific ecologies, it suggests that an ecological sieve influenced whether species dispersed readily, with an ecological generalist showing the highest propensity for historical dispersal among the isolated rivers of the Brazilian coast (i.e., the most recent divergence times and frequent gene flow estimated for barriers). We discuss how our findings, and in particular what the temporal dissonance, despite common geographic passages, suggest about past dispersal structuring coastal communities as a function of ecological and paleo-landscape sieves.

opencc-by-4.0Apr 2017View details →

Metabolic impacts of climate change on marine fish communities and fisheries - Dataset and figure plot script

Here we provide the MATLAB functions, model forcing data (net primary production and temperature), and model output required to generate the figures and perform calculations from the manuscript "Metabolic impacts of climate change on marine fish communities and fisheries", which is currently in submission as a research article. The figures plot script (plot_figures_climate_fish_deconstruction.m) is written in MATLAB version R2012a.

opencc-by-4.0Oct 2023View details →

Powder River Fish Community Dataset

Dataset accompanying "Functional turnover and fish-community trends over 130 years in a prairie watershed" by Niall G. Clancy, Jonathan A. McFarland, Megan G. Ahern, and Annika W. Walters.Column descriptors are included as a note in the Excel file.

opencc-zeroJan 2024View details →

Uptake of Human Papilloma Virus vaccine among young women living in fishing communities in Wakiso and Mukono districts, Uganda

Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is a preventable cause of cervical cancer, the most common cancer among women in Uganda. The Uganda Ministry of Health included the HPV vaccine in the free routine immunization schedule since 2015. Five years after this policy, we assessed the uptake of the HPV vaccine and associated socio-demographic factors among young women living in fishing communities in Central Uganda in 2020. We analyzed secondary data from 94 young women aged 9–25 years who were recruited from the two fishing communities (Kasenyi landing site and Koome Island) in a primary implementation study that aimed to promote awareness of maternal and childhood vaccines. We assessed uptake of the HPV vaccine as the proportion of participants who self-reported to have ever received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine. We assessed the socio-demographic factors associated with HPV vaccine uptake using a modified Poisson regression model adjusted for clustering by study site in STATA version 17. The mean (standard deviation) age of study participants was 21.1 (3.1) years and most (81.9%) of them were from Kasenyi landing site. The uptake of the HPV vaccine was 10.6% [95% Confidence Interval (CI) 5.6, 18.9]. After adjusting for covariates, being 20–25 years old (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] 0.18, 95%CI 0.06, 0.59) and of Catholic religion (aPR 5.55, 95%CI 1.53, 20.16) were significantly associated with HPV vaccine uptake. The HPV vaccine uptake was very low, despite the reported 99% national coverage of HPV vaccination program for the first dose at the end of 2019. Age and religion were shown to be important determinants of the HPV vaccine uptake. Reasons for very low uptake of HPV vaccinations need to be carefully assessed to find effective strategies to improve it.

opencc-by-4.0Mar 2024View details →

Supplementary data for Development of Indicators of Social Vulnerability and Fishing Reliance in English Coastal Communities

Supplementary data for Development of Indicators of Social Vulnerability and Fishing Reliance in English Coastal Communities by Tom Gibson, Chloe Lucas and Angela Muench. Full details are available via the publication and details of folder and file structures are available in the ReadMe file.

Figure 86 in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 86: Correlation between the surface area and maximum depth of lakes surveyed in Projet Lac.

Fish species reported to occur in the lake but not recorded in Projet Lac in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Fish species reported to occur in the lake but not recorded in Projet Lac

Figure 69 c in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 69 c)

Figure 68 in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 68: Fish from Projet Lac being prepared by museum staff for long-term preservation.

Figure 64 in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 64: Electrofishing from boat (left) and by wading (right).

Figure 45 in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 45: Diversity of Salmo spp recorded in Projet Lac.

Figure 69 b in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 69 b

Figure 48 in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 48: The three forms of Salvelinus in Swiss lakes described by Konrad Gessner in 1575.

Figure 57 in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 57: Extremes of variation in fin colour in Perca fluviatilis within and among lakes.

Figure 60 in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 60: An example of a littoral habitat map from Lake Bret.

Figure 2 in Diversity, distribution and community composition of fish in perialpine lakes – "Projet Lac" synthesis report

Figure 2: Example of the distribution of sampling actions throughout a lake (Constance Untersee).