INTRODUCTION 



The goals of the Long-term Illinois River Fish Population Monitoring Program 

 include: 1) determination of spatial and temporal trends in fish populations of the 

 Illinois River; 2) Develop a long-term fisheries database useful for evaluating 

 resource management strategies; and 3) provide information required to manage the 

 fishery of the Illinois River. This report presents a summary of data collected 1994- 

 1998 during segments 6-10 of federal aid project F-101-R, The Long-term Illinois 

 River Fish Population Monitoring Program. Previous summaries of the long-term 

 data set, begun in 1957, were given by Sparks and Starrett (1975), Sparks (1977), 

 Sparks and Lerczak (1993), Lerczak and Sparks (1994), and Lerczak et al. (1994). 

 The annual reports for project F-101-R have continuously built on previously 

 collected data. The format used in this report is patterned after previous annual 

 reports of this project (Lerczak et al. 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996 and Koel et al. 

 1997 and 1998) to allow for easy comparisons of data among years. The objective 

 of this report is to provide a summary document of Illinois River fish population data 

 collected 1994-1998 during federal aid project F-101-R. 



STUDY AREA 



Twenty-six fish sampling sites were at fixed locations along the Illinois 

 Waterway as defined by Sparks and Starrett (1975:347) and Lerczak et al. (1994:9) 



