Aquatic fauna and fisheries evidence index for the Beaver archipelago, 2026

What this adds

This index creates an aquatic layer that can be read alongside the forest, vegetation, soil, geology, wetland, and wildlife indexes without collapsing different kinds of evidence into a single “fish” count. It contains 37 rows:

The wetland rows preserve the surrounding soil, hydrology, vegetation, and stewardship excerpts when the source supplies them. For example, the Hog and Garden coastal-fen records connect crayfish burrows and Hine’s emerald dragonfly habitat language to alkaline peat and marl, groundwater seepage, Great Lakes water-level fluctuation, sphagnum hummocks, sedges, rushes, and conifer or wetland edges. Those are source-supported habitat relationships, not predictions for every comparable soil or land-cover unit.

Island and archipelago frame

Twenty-three rows have an exact island label within the seven-island ecology matrix:

Fourteen additional rows remain outside the seven-island summary: Ojibwa Island, Trout Island, Gull Island, and the Gull Island area. These smaller islands are not discarded; their GLO fishery-use, fish-shanty, fish-house, and fishing-village evidence remains queryable in the underlying index and in the outer-island ecology layer. Similar names or a broad survey area are not silently assigned to one of the seven named islands.

Three evidence questions

The index is most useful when it keeps three questions separate:

1. What aquatic animal or habitat signal did a source document? Crayfish burrows, pondsnail list entries, Hine’s emerald dragonfly habitat, and fish spawning language belong here.
2. What human fishery use did the historical surveyor record? Fish shanties, fish houses, fishermen’s villages, and whitefish-fishery descriptions are evidence of use or observation at a bounded page and date.
3. What did a federal agency plan, distribute, or expect? The 1898–1899 reports preserve egg-collection planning, fishermen’s letters, and a fry distribution table, but the wording does not establish a local hatchery, collection station, release shoreline, or continuing program.

The seven-island connectivity matrix now carries the first question beside the second and third as separate evidence-class counts. That makes it possible to ask how aquatic records sit beside soils, wetlands, forests, and geology while retaining the fact that a fishery-use observation is not an aquatic occurrence and an aquatic occurrence is not a population estimate.

Evidence limits

• Wetland-animal signals are source excerpts or source-defined list entries, not abundance, occupancy, or complete inventories.
• GLO fish shanties, fish houses, fishing villages, and whitefish-fishery language document historical use or surveyor description, not species counts, catch totals, or modern habitat.
• Federal egg-collection planning and fry-distribution tables document agency action or planning; they do not prove a local collection, hatchery, release shoreline, or sustained program unless the source says so.
• Explicit GLO PLSS joins preserve only the named source section. No page-bounded observation is expanded into a survey polygon or parcel.
• Island-level soil, geology, wetland, stream, canopy, and land-cover context is not assigned to an aquatic record as a habitat-suitability determination.
• Zero records, absent coordinates, and missing source coverage are coverage results, not evidence of aquatic absence.

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes