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PiSCES Dataset

Published by U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD) | U.S. Environmental Protection Agency | Metadata Last Checked: August 02, 2025 | Last Modified: 2019-08-01
The Piscine Stream Community Estimation System (PiSCES) provides users with a hypothesized fish community for any stream reach in the conterminous United States using information obtained from Nature Serve, the US Geological Survey (USGS), StreamCat, and the Peterson Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of North America for over 1000 native and non-native freshwater fish species. PiSCES can filter HUC8-based fish assemblages based on species-specific occurrence models; create a community abundance/biomass distribution by relating relative abundance to mean body weight of each species; and allow users to query its database to see ancillary characteristics of each species (e.g., habitat preferences and maximum size). Future efforts will aim to improve the accuracy of the species distribution database and refine/augment increase the occurrence models. The PiSCES tool is accessible at the EPA's Quantitative Environmental Domain (QED) website at https://qed.epacdx.net/pisces/. This dataset is associated with the following publication: Cyterski, M., C. Barber, M. Galvin, R. Parmar, J. Johnston, D. Smith, A. Ignatius, L. Prieto, and K. Wolfe. PiSCES: Pi(scine) Stream Community Estimation System. ENVIRONMENTAL MODELLING & SOFTWARE. Elsevier Science, New York, NY, 127: 104703, (2020).

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