Relative abundance of fish species in response to shoreline development

To pursue the COREBIO goal of obtaining baseline fish communities of undisturbed, pristine locations in Croatia, we categorized each of over 10.000 lure-assisted visual census transects as occurring in an area with natural, intermediate, or developed shoreline, and for each species calculated 1) the regression of fish abundance on the degree of development, and 2) the ratio of probabilities of occurrence in natural versus developed sites. We found two communities based on significant regressions. The community of fish significantly positively correlated with natural shoreline was found to exhibit significant preferences also for rocky habitat associated with vegetation, generally erect or turf algae and the seagrass Posidonia. (R: rock, P: Posidonia, U: unconsolidated, A: algae, C: Cymodocea, b: bare rock, t: rock with turf, v: rock with erect algae.)