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Tallapoosa River |
Aquatic GAP applications have been created for two centers of aquatic biodiversity, the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa (ACT) and Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basins. The ACT and ACF basins span broad ranges of physiographic settings and harbor exceptionally high levels of species richness and endemism, providing ideal opportunities for testing and refining approaches to predict species occurrences and community attributes in relation to physical variables. The ACT basin (58,708 km2) originates in the Blue Ridge province of the Southern Appalachian Mountains in Georgia and Tennessee, drains extensive portions of the Valley and Ridge and Piedmont provinces in west Georgia and east Alabama, and of the Coastal Plan in lower Alabama. Physiographic and climatic diversity, with a geologic history of isolation punctuated by interbasin dispersal, and protection from Pleistocene glaciation, have fostered development in the ACT of the some of the highest levels of aquatic faunal diversity and endemism recorded in temperate freshwaters. At least 184 freshwater fishes occur natively in the ACT . The Coosa River system alone contains at least 15 endemic fishes as well as remnants of an exceptionally diverse molluscan fauna (Bogan et al. 1995; Burkhead et al. 1995; Neves et al. 1997). The Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers (our focus in the ACF) together drain 44,607 km2 of Georgia and east Alabama, including Blue Ridge, Piedmont and Coastal Plain provinces. Fish and molluscan faunas are distinct from those in both Atlantic Slope drainages to the east and the ACT (to the west), and include at least 97 native fishes and 32 native mussel species (Couch et al. 1996; Brim Box and Williams 2000). One fourth of the native ACF mussel faunal is endemic to the basin (Brim Box and Williams 2000), along with at least six fish species (Warren et al. 2000). |
