Standardized Methods for Sampling Fishes in Streams of Panama

The purpose of this chapter is to outline methods for standardized sampling of stream fishes in Panama. For the purposes of this document, we define “stream fishes” to mean any fish species (classes Petromyzontida, Chondrichthyes, Sarcopterygii, and Actinopterygii) that spends any portion of its life in freshwater streams that are shallow enough to be sampled by wading. This definition includes species that are lifetime residents in fresh water, as well as those that migrate between fresh and salt water over the course of a lifetime (i.e., anadromous, catadromous, and amphidromous species). We anticipate that the methods described herein can be applied to any wadeable stream in Panama to produce comparable data on fish distribution and abundance.