Kenai National Wildlife Refuge Aquatic Invasive Plant Surveys 2023

Occurrence
Latest version published by United States Fish and Wildlife Service on Dec 6, 2023 United States Fish and Wildlife Service

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Description

To maintain biological integrity, biological diversity, and native fish resources in Kenai Peninsula freshwater systems, we surveyed for invasive elodea in Kenai Peninsula lakes using rakethrow surveys.

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 476 records.

2 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

Occurrence (core)
476
MeasurementOrFacts 
1428
Multimedia 
970

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

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Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is United States Fish and Wildlife Service. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: bb398390-d071-4e6b-aa2e-e69709d620fb.  United States Fish and Wildlife Service publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation

Contacts

Matthew Bowser
  • Metadata Provider
  • Originator
  • Point Of Contact
Fish and Wildlife Biologist
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US
Kristine Inman
  • AssociatedParty
  • Originator
  • Point Of Contact
Supervisory Biologist
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US
Nathan Davis
  • Originator
Biological Technician
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US
Kristian Merrell
  • Originator
Biological Technician
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US
Beth Sullivan
  • Originator
Volunteer
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
Dom Watts
  • Originator
Wildlife Biologist/Pilot
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US
Chris Snyder
  • Originator
Student Conservation Association Crew
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US
Sean Wise
  • Originator
Biological Intern
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US
Ethan Bowser
  • Originator
Volunteer
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US
Shealyn Imgarten
  • Originator
Youth Conservation Corp Crew Leader
USFWS Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
PO Box 2139
99669 Soldotna
Alaska
US

Geographic Coverage

The geographic extent included freshwater lakes in the vicinity of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, USA.

Bounding Coordinates South West [59.131, -151.611], North East [61.09, -149.348]

Taxonomic Coverage

We surveyed for non-native plants, especially Elodea.

Kingdom Plantae (plants)

Temporal Coverage

Start Date / End Date 2023-06-27 / 2023-09-22

Project Data

No Description available

Title Kenai National Wildlife Refuge Aquatic Invasive Species Surveys
Identifier https://ecos.fws.gov/ServCat/Reference/Profile/149924
Funding This work was funded by National Wildlife Refuge System Strike Team Funds.
Study Area Description The Study area was much of the northwestern Kenai Peninsula where most of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge is situated, bounded by Tustumena Lake to the south, Cook Inlet to the west, Turnagain Arm to the north, and the Kenai Mountains to the east. This area is characterized by mixed boreal forest, wetlands, lakes, and streams. This region was described in detail by Kenai National Wildlife Refuge and US Fish & Wildlife Service, Alaska Regional Office, Division of Conservation Planning & Policy (2010).

The personnel involved in the project:

Kristine Inman
Nathan Davis
Kristian Merrell
Sean Wise
Dominique Watts
  • Author
Beth Sullivan
  • Author
Chris Snyder
  • Author
Ethan Bowser
  • Author
Shealyn Imgarten
  • Author

Sampling Methods

We selected 23 lakes to survey for elodea in 2023, mostly basing our selections on the prioritization of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Invasive Species Lake Prioritization (Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 2022). We also took into account recent pike surveys, avoiding lakes that had been surveyed for pike in the last 10 years or where surveys are planned for 2024. We collaboratively planned with our partners, openly sharing our survey schedule. We sought to keep the number of sites sampled per lake to between 30 and 60 sampling locations per lake. We related the range of lake perimeters in our study area to this range of sample sizes with the linear formula n = mp + b, where where n was the sample size, m was 2.4 km-1, p was the perimeter in km, and b was 27. This resulted in a range of sample sizes of 30 to 63 sampling locations per lake. To select sampling points we used a Quarto document that called R, version 4.2.3 (R Core Team, 2023) and used the R packages lwgeom, version 0.2-13 (Pebesma, 2023) and sf, version 1.0-12 (Pebesma, 2018; Pebesma and Bivand, 2023). We divided the lake perimeters into segments, one segment corresponding to a target sampling location in each lake. Our rake throw survey methods were similar to the examples of Fulkerson (2022a) and Fulkerson (2022b).

Study Extent Our target universe was the set of all waterbodies in the study area susceptible to invasion by non-native plants, particularly elodea. Our initial sample frame was the set of lakes in the vicinity of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. We considered individual lakes to be the sampling units.

Method step description:

  1. Within each pre-determined lake segment, we selected a location where elodea would be most likely to occur based on our previous experience surveying for elodea on the Kenai Peninsula. Within the larger segments, we selected protected bays and avoided exposed points. We positioned our boat off of shore, usually a little farther from shore than the limit of dense emergent vegetation, often in about 1–2 m water depth.
  2. From the selected point the two observers threw the two rakes perpendicular to the shoreline: one rake thrown toward shore and the other out toward the center of the lake. After allowing the rakes to contact the bottom, both observers slowly and simultaneously pulled in the rakes, dragging them over the substrate. The rakes were carefully brought onto the boat, photographed, and the presence or absence of elodea was recorded. We also recorded depth, substrate types, and the presence of other aquatic plant species.

Bibliographic Citations

  1. Alaska Department of Fish and Game (2022) Alaska invasive species lake prioritization. Alaska Department of Fish and Game. https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/41a6f3a3f35f4e0fae52f9c5a0c2fbd2/ https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/41a6f3a3f35f4e0fae52f9c5a0c2fbd2/
  2. Kenai National Wildlife Refuge & US Fish & Wildlife Service, Alaska Regional Office, Division of Conservation Planning & Policy (2010) Comprehensive Conservation Plan: Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Anchorage, Alaska: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. https://ecos.fws.gov/ServCat/Reference/Profile/149784 https://ecos.fws.gov/ServCat/Reference/Profile/149784
  3. Fulkerson JR (2022a) Aquatic Plant and Elodea Survey in Chugach National Forest: 2021 Survey Results. Anchorage, Alaska: Alaska Center for Conservation Science, University of Alaska Anchorage, pp. 26 + appendix.
  4. Fulkerson JR (2022b) Aquatic Plant and Elodea Survey in Chugach National Forest: 2022 Survey Results. Anchorage, Alaska: Alaska Center for Conservation Science, University of Alaska Anchorage, pp. 21 + appendix.
  5. Pebesma E (2018) Simple features for R: Standardized support for spatial vector data, The R Journal, 10(1), pp. 439–446. https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2018-009. https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2018-009
  6. Pebesma E (2023) lwgeom: Bindings to selected ’liblwgeom’ functions for simple features. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lwgeom. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lwgeom
  7. Pebesma E & Bivand R (2023) Spatial data science: With applications in R. Chapman and Hall/CRC, p. 352. https://r-spatial.org/book/. https://r-spatial.org/book/
  8. R Core Team (2023) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/. https://www.R-project.org/

Additional Metadata

Alternative Identifiers bb398390-d071-4e6b-aa2e-e69709d620fb
https://ipt.gbif.us/resource?r=kenai-national-wildlife-refuge-aquatic-invasive-plant-surveys