Fish Life-History Strategies and Lake Community Data from Wisconsin Lakes

Andrew L. Rypel from the University of California, Davis compiled this dataset for the study 'Ecosystem size filters life-history strategies to shape community assembly in lakes'. It contains three related datasets covering 71 fish species from north temperate lakes in Wisconsin, USA. The data include life-history traits, species occurrence, and limnological characteristics of the study lakes.

Use Cases

• Classifying fish life-history strategies based on critical trait data and the Winemiller and Rose (1992) framework.
• Analyzing species occurrence patterns across lakes using Euclidean distance-based 'soft classification' results.
• Modeling relationships between lake characteristics (like area and volume) and fish community metrics such as species richness.
• Investigating the distribution of life-history strategy types across lakes using convex hull statistics.

Strengths

• Includes data for 71 distinct fish species, providing a multi-species perspective.
• Integrates three related datasets covering species traits, occurrences, and lake characteristics.
• Applies established ecological frameworks for strategy classification (Winemiller and Rose, 1992).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to its collection from Wisconsin lakes.

Provenance

Source

Andrew L. Rypel, University of California, Davis

Collection Method

Collected from north temperate lakes in Wisconsin, USA, for a specific ecological study.

Geography

North temperate lakes in Wisconsin, USA