I have been reading through some river population assesments that I had emailed to me.

What is CPUE? and the # that correlate with it?

i.e.

2
3.58

CPUE stands for "Catch Per Unit of Effort"

A Unit of Effort varies based on how you are collecting the fish.

For gillnets, one unit is one standard gillnet set for 24 hours. Same for trapnets. For seines, it's one haul of the seine.

For electrofishing, it varies - usually one hour of electrofishing, or one standard-length run.

For weird, non-standard methods - it's a measure of how hard you tried to catch fish. For angling for fish, it's often the "angler-hour" - one angler fishing for one hour. For trotlines, it's 24 hours set with 25 trotline hooks.

So, a CPUE of 2.2 in gillnets means that, on average, 2.2 fish of a given species were caught per 24-hour set. This might be achieved by catching 22 fish by setting 10 nets.

In rivers, it's often electrofishing, so a CPUE of 3.8 means that, for all the electrofishing runs they did, the crew captured an average of 3.8 fish per electrofishing run.

Hope that helps.

Corey

The only thing I would add on to that is that the standard for electrofishing streams (at least for the MPCA) is 100 meters. But, sometimes other measurements are used such as hours (like Corey mentioned or a multiple of the streams width.

Speaking of the MPCA...

The MPCA map based water quality surveys for the whole state of MN can be found here:
http://www.pca.state.mn.us/data/edaWater/index.cfm

Clicking on "Map-based search for Surface Water Monitoring Sites and Data" will bring up a new window with every sampling site. The brown squares are biological sampling locations, most of which are fish sampling. The nice thing about the MPCA is they report everything, from shiners, to hogsuckers to walleyes. It is an invaluable site for finding odd species.

Tyler W wrote:

QUOTE:
Clicking on "Map-based search for Surface Water Monitoring Sites and Data" will bring up a new window with every sampling site. The brown squares are biological sampling locations, most of which are fish sampling. The nice thing about the MPCA is they report everything, from shiners, to hogsuckers to walleyes. It is an invaluable site for finding odd species.

OK, anyone know of a similar bunch of info for Wisconsin? Illinois? Any other states?
O

Thanks guys that is what I wanted to know. Just needed spelled out for me. Lots of great info out there if your will to make phone calls and emails.