National Hydropower Fish Passage Database

Overview

Fish passage facilities are used to mitigate impacts of hydropower dams to migratory fish in rivers, but information on the location, types, and characteristics of this infrastructure is incomplete at a national scale. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) partnered with fish passage engineers and hydropower experts from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA NMFS), and the Low Impact Hydropower Institute (LIHI) to create the first national scale database of fish passage infrastructure at US hydropower developments. This database contains information on fish passage facility engineering characteristics, targeted fish species, operational schedule, and costs, which is of great value to a diverse range of stakeholders. This data resource addresses a large gap in knowledge of the deployment of fish passage technology and is freely available to members of the hydropower community, including federal and state regulators and resource agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), industry, and other user groups to support project planning and regulatory (re)licensing activities. This database supports the US Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office objective to develop decision support tools and data resources that improve environmental performance and ensure hydropower’s long-term value to the American public.

Hydropower dams may act as partial or total barriers to the movements of migratory fish in rivers, reducing population connectivity within watersheds as well as restricting access to habitat to complete complex life histories. There are a wide variety of technologies that may be implemented for fish passage, and a myriad of site-specific parameters to be considered to ensure safe, timely, and effective passage is achieved. This variety in technologies, combined with the site-specific nature of facility design and lack of understanding of what is truly needed to achieve fish passage, has also limited our understanding of the deployment and performance of different fish passage technologies and the required costs for construction, operations, and maintenance at a facility. The current state of knowledge regarding the deployment of fish passage infrastructure is incomplete at a national scale in the United States. When available, information on fish passage costs is often limited to the planning stage, instead of the implementation and operation stages, and is usually aggregated, which limits our ability to identify drivers of costs. We addressed this critical knowledge gap by creating a geo-referenced and attributed dataset of fish passage infrastructure and costs, and a list of fish passage performance studies that have been conducted at hydropower developments at a national scale through collaborative partnerships with fish passage engineers at both the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA NMFS), and low-impact hydropower experts at the Low Impact Hydropower Institute (LIHI).

Building the fish passage database was a multi-step process that involved: 1) identifying all distinct hydropower features in the conterminous United States; 2) collecting fish passage facility information from project partners, other hydropower stakeholders, online datasets available for download, or the stakeholder questionnaire; 3) matching this information to its corresponding hydropower feature(s); 4) converting the relevant variables in the obtained data to database format; and 5) stitching all converted data together in the database schematic. Each time we received new or updated fish passage data from an information source, we repeated the last 3 steps to incorporate the updates into the database. In this way, the Fish Passage Database collated and bundled all fish passage information for a given hydropower feature from any source(s) that provided it, with each source attributed to the specific information it provided.