Development and use of the Wetland Fish Index to assess the quality of coastal wetlands in the Laurentian Great Lakes

We use fish and environmental data from 40 wetlands of the Laurentian Great Lakes to develop the Wetland Fish Index (WFI), a tool that can be used to assess the quality of coastal marshes. A partial canonical correspondence analysis was used to ordinate fish species along multidimensional environmental axes that accounted for anthropogenic disturbance based on temperature, conductivity, and the presence of pollutants (e.g., suspended solids and …