Fitzroy River floodplain fish data set

While it is widely recognised that reduced river-floodplain connectivity has contributed to the decline of biodiversity in floodplain rivers, surprisingly few studies have quantified the relationship between connectivity, pool persistence, and fish assemblage structure to the level required to generate measurable targets for management. We maximised our capacity to describe unbiased hydrology-fish relationships by sampling fish assemblages in floodplain pools with a variety of connection histories (60 sampling events) over four years (2018-2021). Our study was conducted in the lowland reaches (~lower 350 km) of a tropical wet-dry river threatened by water resource development and elevated temperatures associated with climate change, the Fitzroy River (Western Australia).

Data set includes physical and chemical data associated with water quality and within-site habitat, biological data pertaining to fish, and data pertinent to river-floodplain connectivity including spatial, temporal and hydrological data.