Zusammenfassung: The authors sampled fishes and measured microhabitat in series of contiguous habitat units (riffles, runs, pools) in three Virginia streams. Monte Carlo simulations were used to construct hypothetical series of habitat units, then examined how number of species, similarity in relative abundances, and number of microhabitats accumulated with increasing number of habitat units (i.e., sampling effort). The curves indicated that 90% of the species present were usually found by sampling 5 to 14 habitat units (stream length of 22-67 stream widths). Estimates of species relative abundances required less sampling effort for a given accuracy than estimates of number of species. Rates of species accumulation (with effort) varied among streams and reflected discontinuity in species distributions among habitat units. Most discontinuity seemed to be due to low population density rather than to habitat selectivity. Results from an Illinois stream corroborated our findings from Virginia, and suggested that greater sampling effort is needed to characterize fish community structure in more homogeneous stream reaches.

Zusammenfassung: Leslie's removal method, which is used to estimate the initial population size and the removal ratio simultaneously, is modeled in terms of the product of binomial distributions. The approximation of these binomial distributions to the standard normal distribution presents a new method which has no bias for estimators. This is an improvement over the maximum likelihood method and the likelihood ratio test, and is essentially equivalent to a standard goodness-of-fit test. The confidence region on the 2-dimensional plane defined by the initial population size and the removal ratio gives each confidence interval. This region is defined by the chi-square distribution with 2 degrees of freedom.