Climate impacts to inland fishes: Shifting research topics over time

Abstract

Climate change remains a primary threat to inland fishes and fisheries. Using topic modeling to examine trends and relationships across 36 years of scientific literature on documented and projected climate impacts to inland fish, we identify ten representative topics within this body of literature: assemblages, climate scenarios, distribution, climate drivers, population growth, invasive species, populations, phenology, physiology, and reproduction. These topics are largely similar to the output from artificial intelligence application (i.e., ChatGPT) search prompts, but with some key differences. The field of climate impacts on fish has seen dramatic growth since the mid-2000s with increasing popularity of topics related to drivers, assemblages, and phenology. The topics were generally well-dispersed with little overlap of common words, apart from phenology and reproduction which were closely clustered. Pairwise comparisons between topics revealed potential gaps in the literature including between reproduction and distribution and between physiology and phenology. A better understanding of these relationships can help capitalize on existing literature to inform conservation and sustainable management of inland fishes with a changing climate.