National Information Collaboration on Ecohydraulics (NICE) Grant: Advancing Fisheries Management in Navigation Systems

There are many locks and dams, navigation channels, and increasingly beneficial sediment-use sites across the Mississippi watershed and throughout the United States. Interest is high in understanding navigation impacts on fisheries and how navigation infrastructure can be used to manage fisheries in the role of navigation. Currently, fisheries impacts are often not explicitly accounted for in lock and dam operations. For example, nearly all dams in the Mississippi Basin and southeastern United States are, by and large, not designed to accommodate fish passage for native fish. Moreover, many of these dams are now being viewed as possible components for control and management of aquatic nuisance species. Some native fishes are now protected under provisions of the Endangered Species Act further heightening interest in the possible influence of locks and dams on fish movement. A primary challenge of the proposed work is to develop strategies that allow fish movement past locks and dams while not impacting navigation operations.

The National Information Collaboration for Ecohydraulics (NICE) has been established with the mission of applying ecohydraulic principles to navigation infrastructure at multiple scales and facilitating accurate engineering forecasts of fisheries outcomes based on research and development for multiple contexts.

The goal of this project is to gather data for the beneficial use of dredged material related to fisheries in order to advance the management of navigation channel maintenance in environmentally sensitive locations. Many beneficial use demonstration projects are underway in the Chesapeake Bay region and elsewhere in the United States (San Francisco Bay, Lower Columbia River, etc). How fish, particularly ESA-listed fish, locate, occupy, and ultimately contribute to population-level processes is vital to understanding the larger ecosystem benefits associated with beneficial reuse. Multidimensional models of how water moves into and out of beneficial use sites and, in turn, how fish respond to these multidimensional flow fields are needed. The influence of emergent vegetation on these outcomes over time and the interconnected sediment budget are important to consider. Aspects of the studies will include the development of high-resolution multidimensional fish tracks in shallow water locations that are or may be future beneficial use locations. The location for the field studies will be in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem.