Monitoring Freshwater Habitats - Advanced Tracking and Sensing Technologies

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed the smallest acoustic transmitters for studying aquatic animals. An integrated sensor network was designed and deployed along the Snake River and the Columbia River to monitor the migrating behavior and survival of salmonids in river environment. A licensed software was developed to analyze the collected massive data sets and provide highly accurate and highly efficient time sequence of 3D locations of species tagged with the transmitters. During the applications at several sites, this 3D tracking solver performed significantly better than other available solvers and was able to reach sub-meter accuracy during in-field testing. Since 2012, more than 35000 fish in the Columbia River Basin were tracked using this sensor network for the purpose of studying species mitigation and environmental restoration. Environmental factors of river, such as water temperature stratification, elevation, and dissolved gas were also investigated to understand their effects on fish behavior. Fish migration, behavior in reservoir, acclimation patterns, and passage through hydraulic structures, especially hydroelectric dams, were evaluated using high-quality 3D tracks.