Map Development And My Current Flame Chub Tally

I'm wrapping up the summer school semester this week, giving my Biology 1 final exam tomorrow morning (it's easy, really!). I've also paused to tote up and appraise where I am on the flame chub distribution project. Yesterday I had the time to sit down and read through my field notes to count up sites visited, and flame chub populations found. I have a correction: I've actually visited 50 historic collection sites rather than 47, and found flame chubs at 18 of them, for an apparent 64% stream range reduction across north Alabama. The 50 sites visited represent 85 of the 151 museum collections at the University of Alabama Ichthyology Collection. So, I think I've hit a reasonable sample of the sites available. I've also visited several sites where we weren't able to do a real sampling, such as Big Spring Creek in Blount County (difficult stream access and large woody debris in stream), Wheeler Spring in Lawrence County (beaverdam raising water level too high) and Pickens Spring in Limestone County (unable to gain landowner's permission). Plus, I've found four previously unreported flame chub site locations: French Mill Creek in Limestone County, Limestone Creek in Madison County, Paint Rock Creek in Marshall County and Hurricane Creek in Jackson County.

I met with Kevin yesterday in his office to discuss developing various GIS-based maps in ArcView to represent my results. The end result will be clearly annotated large wall maps, at least 3 ft. X 3 ft., and smaller, simpler maps for publication purposes. When I get one of the latter I'll post it here as a fer-instance.

A good case can be made that flame chubs have undergone a significant range reduction over the last 40 years or so in north 'bama. My results don't include the apparent extirpation of isolated populations of flame chubs to the SE of north 'bama from several springs in Talladega and Calhoun counties, fairly close to the city of Anniston. The huge question remains just what's causing these local extinctions. Local human land use decisions certainly are a big part of it, but maybe not the whole story. Are flame chubs somehow more sensitive to some other changing parameters, such as local climate changes including rainfall patterns? It sounds plausible but I certainly don't have any evidence for it. I'll leave you with that thought.