Prior to settlement, Illinois contained vast areas of natural wetlands, most of which were drained for agricultural production. The transformation dramatically modified geomorphological and ecological conditions associated with the rivers and streams. An ongoing debate has focused on how these modified waterways should be maintained, or whether they should be restored. An alternate solution is stream naturalization, which seeks to define a viable management goal for watersheds in landscapes characterized by intensive human modification. To help expand that knowledge base, Herricks and his students recently developed an improved electrofishing technique that more closely relates fish species with stream habitats.
Fish are stunned, netted for counting and released.
But this technique disturbs the position of the fish, and is only effective for large volumes. By first characterizing specific habitat types on the basis of an extensive analysis of channel morphology, and then performing detailed fish counts, the researchers can draw general conclusions concerning the potential effectiveness of various approaches at stream naturalization.