Review and assessment of biotic variables and analytical methods used in estuarine inflow studies

Published and gray literature, and works in progress, were reviewed to identify biotic variables and analytical methods used in studying freshwater inflow needs of estuaries. Landings, CPUE, and other measures of single-species abundance are most often used, especially for shellfish and finfish. These efforts work best when biomass is used and lag times are allowed for recruitment, but neither method is always used, and most efforts have assumed that physical habitat availability is constant. Efforts employing habitat and community-level variables are used less often but more recent attempts are using dynamic as well as stationary definitions of habitat. Even stationary habitat methods have given less attention to tidal freshwater and brackish estuarine reaches, than to other reaches. Natural long-period climate cycles (El Ninõ Southern Oscillation; North Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation) are not factored into most inflow studies. Three promising approaches are encouraged; a mixture of variables representing different levels of ecological organization should be used, the natural non-linear geometry of estuaries (especially tidal rivers) should be exploited to identify critical thresholds of inflow, and the validity of using instream flow methods to calculate estuarine requirements by proxy should be determined.