Urban Pond Ecology at the Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area

When most people think of Phoenix, Arizona, they think of sprawling cityscapesand hot desert mountains full of saguaros and other cacti. They rarely think of water and fish, and yet, the Arizona landscape is home to many lakes, ponds, rivers and streams, full of both native fish and sportfish, including in the urban areas. According to the report by DeSemple in 2006, between the years 2001 and 2006, the Rio Salado Environmental Restoration Project worked to revitalize the dry river bed that runs through Phoenix, that included the construction of two urban ponds, the Demonstration Pond and the Reservoir Pond. At the start of this study, it was unknown what vertebrate species inhabited these ponds, but it was known that these urban ponds have been used to dump unwanted aquatic pets. The bluegill Lepomis macrochirus was found to reside in both ponds, and as it is such an important sportfish species, it was chosen as the focal species for these studies, which took place over periods in March, May, July, and September of 2021. Single-season occupancy models were used to attempt to determine how L. macrochirus, use the microhabitats within the system, and a multi-season model was used to estimate their recruitment, and seasonal changes in occupancy. In addition, this study also attempts to understand the size structures of the L. macrochirus population in the Reservoir Pond and the population in the Demonstration Pond, and if that size structure varies from March to September. As the populations of these ponds are physically isolated from one another, statistical tests were also done to determine if the size structures of the two populations of L. macrochirus differ from one another and found that the two populations do indeed differ from one another, but only during two of the sampling periods.