Robert L. Kendall Best Paper in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society

Fishy Fridays

Weekly spotlight on fisheries science journal articles

 

Jeff Kopaska
AFS Executive Director
jkopaska@fisheries.org

AFS recently announced the winners of the Best Papers in our suite of journals for 2024.  I am going to take the opportunity to highlight a few of these papers in the coming weeks.  Today, I’m starting with the Robert L. Kendall Best Paper in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society – Multiscale analysis predicts native species presence based on habitat and nonnative species abundance (free access). I found this paper to be interesting in the old which came first, the chicken or the egg analogy. The paper assesses the success of native fish repatriation activities in the Gila River watershed of Arizona and New Mexico.  Where did the repatriation work? It depends! Species make a difference, abiotic habitat makes a difference, the other fish in the community make a difference, spatial scale makes a difference, etc.  The authors make a great point at the end of the paper, alluding to the conclusion that how you go about an assessment can often be as insightful as the results that the data provide. Enjoy!