Long-term minnow community data from the Bayou Pierre, Mississippi

• Main Author: Stearman, Loren
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: fish community; Leuciscidae; Minnow; Bayou Pierre; Long-term community change; Minnows; The Minnows
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/6474175; https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.vx0k6djtx

Long-term community monitoring is becoming an important tool for ecological studies. Historical data are present in a variety of sources but often require considerable effort to extract, filter, and verify prior to analyses. In this dataset we document minnow (sensu lato, Cyprinidae + Leuciscidae) communities in the Bayou Pierre, Mississippi. We include filtered community data from twelve localities and three time periods (1974-75, 1985-89, 2019-20) derived from a mixture of literature, museum collections, and contemporary collecting efforts. All collections were made using comparable methodologies. We also include an additional 29 contemporary collections which do not have historical representation but which cover the majority of the watershed. We further include a trait database coded from literature values which captures both reproductive and ecological traits for the species in these data. These data were used in preparation of a manuscript examining long-term taxonomic, ecological, and functional change within the minnows in the Bayou Pierre, and they are part of a broader research effort to study the effects of fluvial geomorphic evolution on aquatic ecosystems. Site numbering is consistent in all sampling time periods (i.e., site 1 is the same locality in all three contemporary to recent data, and in the full contemporary data). Latitutes and longitudes for collection localities are given in the full contemporary data. Nearly all specimens from the 1985-89 and 2019-20 sampling efforts have been deposited at the University of Southern Mississippi's Ichthyological Collections (excluding individuals too large to fit into a field sample jar). The twelve historic to contemporary sample localities represent sampling effort overlap in the three time periods. Both the original sources for the 1974-75 and 1985-89 data contain other records which did not meet our criteria, or which represented nonmatching site localities with one another.Funding provided by: U.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceCrossref Funder Registry ...