The Fisheries and Wildlife Resources Group
Equipment
Steve Hiebert, Group Manager, shiebert@usbr.gov, 303-445-2206
The Fisheries and Wildlife Resources Group uses state of the art technology, equipment, and instrumentation to solve your environmental monitoring, research, and regulatory issues. Scroll down or jump to sections by clicking below:
Fish Sampling and Tracking Gear
Water Quality Sampling Gear
Aquaculture, Fish Rearing and Holding
Fishery Control Structures - Hydraulic Flume
Video, Acoustic. and Microscope Camera Technology
Computerized Instrumentation and Analysis Tools
Fish Sampling and Tracking Gear
- Ready to Deploy Sampling and Survey Boats - We maintain 10 sampling and survey work boats of various sizes with trailers, ranging from 23-ft cutty cabin Parkers to small johnboats, inflatables, kayaks and canoes. We have boats for almost every waterbody and a variety of outboard motors for shallow streams to deep water applications. Eight of our boats are rigged for gill and trammel net deployment, and we have an 18-ft Wooldridge jet boat rigged for electrofishing. Additionally, all our field crews are trained and certified DOI Boat Operators.
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Left - The 23-ft Parker cabin cruiser on Bighorn Lake, Montana, outfitted with multiple vertical gill nets for a fish survey. |
Right - An 18-ft aluminum jet boat designed for shallow draft river and shallow lake environmental field work. Here, biologists Rick Wydowski (left) and Eric Best prepare to conduct a razorback sucker survey in the Colorado River at Park Moabi, near Needles, California. |
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Left - One of our inflatable rafts shoving off into the Rio Grande River, New Mexico, for an electrofishing survey. These boats are rated for white water conditions. |
- Passive Fish Sampling Gear – Gill, Trammel, Trap, and Ichthyoplankton Nets
Right - Biologist Dave Moore (left) and biological technician Seth Kennedy (right) retrieving a hoop net from the Rio Grande River in New Mexico. Hoop nets are useful for collecting fish and turtles in flowing waters. |
Left - Biologist Sue Camp of the Montana Area Office, Billings, Montana, with a vertical gill net mounted on the 23-ft Parker cabin cruiser on Bighorn Lake in Montana. |
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- Electrofishing – Lotic and Lacustrine Systems - We have extensive experience and safety certifications for using a variety of boat and backpack electrofishing devices and methods in both lakes and streams.
| Right - A Fisheries and Wildlife Resources Group field crew collecting fish for a population survey using backpack electrofishing gear in the Yakima River, Washington. |  |
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Left - Electrofishing from a boat in the Closed Basin Canal, San Luis Valley, Colorado. |
- Fish Behavior, Kinematics, and Telemetry
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- Hydroacoustics Gear – Dual and Split Beam Sonar Systems, and SonarData’s Echoview Hydroacoustic Analysis Software
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Left - Hydroacoustic technology is a cost effective way to quickly perform fish population surveys and determine bottom topography in large bodies of water. Left - Diagram showing how the dual beam hydroacoustic instrument works. Inset Upper Left - Biologist Juddson Sechrist moniitors the output from the hydroacoustics sensor while the boat follows a transect path using GPS. Inset Bottom Right - The active BioSonics hydroacoustic sensor and receiver unit, usually mounted at the stern of the survey boat. |
| Right - The BioSonics Visual Analyzer software screen output showing typical hydroacoustic data - the echogram used to estimate reservoir bottom topography and fish populations. |  |
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Left - The echogram data can be used to generate a cross section of the reservoir showing the density of fish. The bottom of the reservoir is shown in green, while the water is mapped in yellows to reds. The darker red zones are where the fish are located. This graph was prepared using Surfer 8.0 graphics software. |
Water Quality Sampling Gear
- Multi-parameter water quality probes and water quality sampling devices
Below Left - An Infiltrix computer-controlled automated composite sampling system. This model is set up to pump one liter per hour through a disk filter manifold and a column containing XAD resin to bind herbicides and pesticides. Composite samplers are great tools for collecting time representative samples in systems that experience highly variable conditions, flows, or tides. |
 Above - Research chemist Doug Craft colecting a sediment sample from Ridgway Reservoir, Colorado, using a Ponar Dredge. |
Right - Biologist Juddson Sechrist using a vertical tow net to collect a plankton sample from Bighorn Lake, Montana, to help assess lake productivity. Below - Chemist Norbert Cannon, PN Regional Soil and Water Laboratory, Boise, Idaho, collecting water samples for chemical analyses using a Kemmerer bottle at Lake Owyhee, Oregon.
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- Seepage and Groundwater Well Sampling
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- Microcosm Simulation of River and Lake Sediment-Water Systems
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Predicting reservoir chemistry by simulating the sediment-water interface using microcosms. Water and soil from a planned or existing reservoir are sealed in containers and allowed to develop anaerobic, chemically reducing conditions. Left - Research chemist Doug Craft monitors a 55-gal microcosm in a temperature controlled environmental chamber used to predict the chemistry of Ridgway Reservoir, Colorado. Below - Microcosms can be much smaller, such as these 750 mL vessels used to simulate the sediment-water interface for Jordanelle Reservoir, Utah.
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- Ultra-Clean Sampling Equipment and Protocols for Ultra-Trace Chemical Compounds
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Ultra Clean sample collection at Lake Owyhee, Oregon. Left - Clean hands - dirty hands technique with clean room gloves to handle water samples. Below - The Go-Flo teflon at-depth sampler, a Kemmerer-type bottle for ultra-clean mercury sampling. These clean sampling techniques are essential to collect any water samples for analytes in the nanogram per liter (ng/L) concentration range. Mercury and many herbicides and pesticides are often found in the 10 -100 ng/L range.
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Aquaculture and Fish Holding Facility
- The Denver Aquaculture Facility is an automated indoor laboratory for safely rearing and holding fish needed for experimental work. We have specific facilities for managing and rearing Threatened and Endangered species. The facility can operate in recirculating and flow-through modes, and includes systems for water purification and filtration, temperature control, and disease control.
Right - A view of fish holding tanks at the Denver Aquaculture Facility. |
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Left - The ultraviolet biofilter used to purify the Aquaculture Facility water of bacterial contamination. Below - Looking down into one of the fish tanks showing the electronic tank heater (controller unit in the foreground) used to regulate water temperature. |
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Left - Automatic self-feeding devices over a large fish holding tank in the Denver Aquaculture Facility. These units minimize food debris in the tank water and reduce feeding stress for fish in the tank. |
Fishery Control Structures - Hydraulic Flume
- Onsite Hydraulic Engineering Capabilities (in coordination with 86-68560) and full-scale model testing with live fish in the TSC Water Resources Research Laboratory
A flume is an artificial channel that water can be pumped through to simulate flowing water condiitons. Right - Fish are being tested in the experimental hydraulic flume for avoidance reactions to stobe lights near a bypass structure. The behavior can be studied under light and dark photic conditions. |
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Left - The hydraulic flume is divided by a horizontal bar rack to test how fish of different sizes respond to barrier structure features such as louver width and louver angle to flow. |
Video, Acoustic, and Microscope Camera Technology
- High speed video cameras
- Hi-accuracy color cameras
- Low power underwater lighting
- Digital video recorders
- DIDSON Sonar camera
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Left - The Applied Physics Laboratory (University of Washington) DIDSON (Dual-Frequency Identification Sonar) camera. The lens of this special camera is made of a gel material able to focus and form images using reflected ultrasonic sound waves emitted by the device. DIDSON movie courtesy of Ed Belcher and info about the DIDSON camera available at Sound Metrics Corp. Below Right -DIDSON image of salmon swimming near the entrance to the saltwater drain at the Ballard Locks near Seattle, Washington - click to view the DIDSON movie (collected by Peter Johnson, Sr. Research Scientist at LGL Northwest). |
Right - The DIDSON camera mounted for lowering into the low visibility water of an irrigation canal. The cable goes to a signal processing device which is controlled by a laptop computer. |
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- Microscopy - We have several different types of microscopes available for diagnostic, plankton identification, and morphology imaging. We maintain low power dissection scopes, high power phase contrast scopes, and polarizing microscopes. We also have access to Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) though our TSC colleagues.
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Left - Olympus SZH-10 stereo dissection microscope with a t-mount for a Nikon FG film camera. Our Nikon D-70 digital SLR camera can be attached directly to the t-mount. |
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Computer Data Analysis Technology
- Mapping and GIS using ESRI Software ArcGIS 9.1
- Professional Statistics Software: SAS, SPSS, Minitab, Resampling Statistics, Neuroshell
- Scientific Graphing Software: SigmaPlot, AquaChem, Rockware Utilities, Surfer, Grapher
- Chemical Equilibrium Modeling Software: MINTEQA2, PHREEQE, WATEQ
- Data base design, analysis, and reports using Access, Oracle, and SQL
- Automated Fish Counting and Identification using Motion Analysis Software
Right - Vaki Riverwatcher automated fish counter with underwater video system. This unit was deployed on the Easton Dam Fish Ladder in Washington state. |
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Left - Computer output from the Riverwatcher system software showing the outline of a bull trout, Salvelinus confluentus. The sophisticated pattern recognition software allows the system to be "trained" based on a simplified version of the generalized features of a given species of fish. |
- Graphics and Web Development Software: Corel Draw, Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and ColdFusion
Errors or Comments? Email the webmaster.
This site updated April 22, 2009