USGS South Florida Fish and Invertebrate Assessment Network Harvest

The South Florida Fish and Invertebrate Assessment Network (FIAN) is a monitoring project within the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). It is an element of the Southern Estuaries module of the Monitoring and Assessment Plan (MAP). The FIAN is designed to support the four broad objectives of MAP: (1) to establish a pre-CERP reference state, including variability, for each of the performance measures; (2) to determine the status and trends in the performance measures; (3) to detect unexpected responses of the ecosystem to changes in stressors resulting from CERP activities; and (4) to support scientific investigations designed to increase ecosystem understanding, cause-and-effect, and interpretation of unanticipated results. FIAN is a regional scale monitoring program of seagrass-associated fish and invertebrate (penaeid and caridean shrimp and crabs) communities present in shallow waters of South Florida; the pink shrimp, Farfantepenaeus duorarum, as a restoration indicator, is a species of special interest. FIAN provides input to the pink shrimp performance measure. The pink shrimp emerged as an ecosystem attribute to be monitored from the Florida and Biscayne Bay conceptual ecological models. A 1-m2 throw-trap is the basic gear used to sample fauna in FIAN. Associated with each throw-trap animal sample are measurements of seagrass/algae habitat, water depth, sediment depth and surface temperature, salinity and turbidity. Twice annually, a randomly located throw-trap sample is collected in each cell of a 30-cell grid at each of the 19 monitoring locations at the end of the dry season (April/May) and the wet season (September/October). This dataset describes the quantification of the seagrass using a harvest method (Robblee et al 1991)