USGS Announces Online Access to Nationwide Fish Community Data

Data on fish communities are now available for 960 stream sites in more than 50 major river basins across the Nation. More than 1,900 fish community samples, collected from 1993 through 2002 by the National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program, can be downloaded from http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/data. USGS fish community samples document the presence of all fish species and their relative abundances within designated stream reaches.

These fish data are part of the NAWQA Data Warehouse, which also provides online access to 8 million records of water-quality information, enabling water-resource managers, scientists, and the public to find data about the quality of water or chemical concentrations in aquatic tissue at 4,100 stream sites and 6,500 wells across the United States.

For more information on fish sampling protocols, please refer to, "Revised protocols for sampling algal, invertebrate, and fish communities as part of the National Water-Quality Assessment Program" at http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/protocols/OFR02-150/

Online access to macroinvertebrate and algae data are anticipated this spring and summer, respectively.

For questions regarding online data retrievals, please contact gs.nawqa.data@usgs.gov or Sandy Williamson, 253-428-3600, ext. 2683. For technical questions, such as regarding biological collection methods and taxonomy, please contact Steve Moulton, smoulto@usgs.gov, 703-648-6874. Additional information about NAWQA ecological studies also is available at http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/ecology.