Southeastern Fishes Council
SFC Abstracts
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A GIS Database of Mississippi Fishes:
Approach, Problems, and Application to Conservation Issues
STEPHEN T. ROSS
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS 39406
The ichthyofauna of the southeastern United States has been sampled for several hundred years but most intensively since the 1900's. To understand Mississippi's inland fish fauna, I first constructed a computer database of museum material and then used the information to identify regions requiring further collecting. Museum data are advantageous in offering both temporal and spatial coverage, and the potential for examination of specimens and original field records. Each locality was identified on USGS 1:100,000 maps using universal, transverse, Mercator Coordinates, and the coordinates were added to the database. Since 1986, over 30 fish museum collections in the eastern United States have been accessed, and the current database contains 89,000 records. Data for each species are plotted on State drainage maps using Atlas GIS. Overall, 282 species are recorded, with 202 native, freshwater, 10 non-native, and 70 estuarine/marine species. Most of the 10 drainages have 100 or more species, exceptions being the Lake Pontchartrain and Coastal Rivers. However, a GIS plot of taxon density indicates that centers of species richness are grouped across drainage patterns with a broad band running diagonally from the northeast to southwest corner of the state. Diversity is also high in coastal areas due to the influx of estuarine/marine species.
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