The temporal dynamics of biotic communities have been widely examined by ecologists. However, systematic reviews on how habitat features, sampling and data evaluation influence temporal patterns are rather sporadic. Here, we reviewed 307 peer-reviewed scientific articles to characterize the methods and the approaches, as well as to identify the knowledge gaps in the assessment of the temporal dynamics of freshwater fish assemblages with special regard to their stability patterns. The number of publications increased exponentially over decades. We revealed a highly uneven distribution of the studies among continents and ecosystems with a dominant number of papers derived from North America and Europe, and from lotic systems, especially. We also found large variability among studies even within similar habitat types in the examined spatial and temporal scales, sampling methods used, examined assemblage attributes, potential stressors and data analyses. Several knowledge gaps, such as the limited number of large-scale studies, the insufficient knowledge on the long-term dynamics of early life history stages and on trait-based assemblage organization, were highlighted. For enabling meaningful comparisons of fish assemblage dynamics in space and time, further developments in standardization procedures are needed across sampling and data evaluation possibilities. Publicly accessible long-term data sets with more details on sampling and environmental parameters would also be critically important to determine the effect of a variety of factors on the stability vs. variability of fish assemblages.

中文翻译：

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淡水鱼群的时间动态、背景和量化方法——综合

生物群落的时间动态已被生态学家广泛研究。然而，关于栖息地特征、采样和数据评估如何影响时间模式的系统评价相当零星。在这里，我们回顾了 307 篇经过同行评审的科学文章，以描述方法和方法，并确定评估淡水鱼群时间动态的知识差距，特别是它们的稳定性模式。几十年来，出版物的数量呈指数增长。我们揭示了大陆和生态系统之间研究的高度不平衡分布，主要来自北美和欧洲的论文数量，尤其是来自流动系统的论文。我们还发现，即使在所检查的空间和时间尺度、使用的采样方法、检查的组合属性、潜在压力源和数据分析中，研究之间也存在很大差异。强调了一些知识差距，例如大规模研究数量有限，对早期生命史阶段的长期动态和基于特征的组合组织的知识不足。为了能够在空间和时间上对鱼类群落动态进行有意义的比较，需要在抽样和数据评估的可能性方面进一步发展标准化程序。可公开访问的长期数据集，其中包含有关采样和环境参数的更多详细信息，对于确定各种因素对稳定性与稳定性的影响也至关重要。