NICE Grant: Developing an Operational Ecohydraulic Ecosystem Viewer and R&D Plan

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 develop a framework for an operational ecosystem viewer suitable for online deployment and daily reporting of ecosystem status at various locations. This framework will be based on scientific principles. It will include information on ecosystem attributes such as fish, but also environmental attributes such as hydraulics. 

In addition, this project will develop an R&D plan to guide work conducted under NICE for the next 5 years. This plan will examine current data, data gaps, and serve as a roadmap for narrow data gaps using R&D under the NICE purview. The initial funding amount will not cover all possible locations around the nation envisioned in the plan; therefore, partnering and other alternatives should be considered.