Influence of shoreline features on fish distribution in the Laurentian Great Lakes

In this paper, we used assembled fish distributions (over 9500 field observations) and correlated them with 11 categories of the Great Lakes shoreline (i.e., bedrock, bluff, coarse beach, sandy beach – dune, sandy–silty bank, clay bank, low riverine – coastal plain, composite, wetland, artificial, and unclassified) to validate the appropriateness of classifying Great Lakes fishes into three species complexes (taxocenes) that account for …