This paper describes a technique for ordering wildlife information according to physical strata and vegetative structure so that a variety of statistical analyses can be accomplished. Individual wildlife species are assigned to cells in a species-habitat matrix on the basis of feeding and breeding activities within physical strata in representative types of vegetative cover: the cells within the species-habitat matrix are assigned numeric values. The statistical analyses are thus based on the areas that individual species occupy within the species-habitat matrix. Computer graphics are used to represent the structure of wildlife communities and cluster analysis routines are used to describe the potential wildlife guilds that may exist in different vegetative communities. Different numbers of wildlife guilds will occur in species and presumably also of wildlife guilds present within a type of cover is modified by physical attributes of the vegetation within that cover type. The products of this analytical technique may be suitable for evaluating habitat quality, impact assessments, regional inventories and assessments of wildlife resources, and land-use planning activities.

Increased water resources demand in rivers regulated by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dams has intensified the conflict between preservation of lotic ecosystems and economic benefits of stream regulatin or channel modification. The Riverine Community Habitat and Restoration Concept (RCHARC) facilitates evaluation of effects of different channel configurations or release patterns on fish habitat and can be used to balance water resources development and natural resource preservation. The RCHARC is applied to the Gavins Point Dam tailwater of the Missouri River as a case history to assess the effects of different reservoir release alternatives on habitat for native riverine warmwater fishes. Application of the RCHARC requires four steps. First a comparison standard must be selected which the project alternatives can be contrasted. Second, hydrologic and hydraulic features of the comparison standard having fish habitat significance are described and summarized as an annual series of monthly depth or velocity frequency distributions. Third, a similar approach is used to describe hydrologic and hydraulic features of the project alternatives. Fourth, the habitat value of each of the project alternatives is determined by similarity of their depth or velocity distributions to the distributions of the standard. The more similar an alternative is to the standard system, the higher it will be ranked.

Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.