Lee Baumgartner is a professor at Charles Sturt University’s Institute for Land, Water, and Society, where he leads research related to fish passage and fish migration. He is a licensee of HydroPASSAGE's Hydropower Biological Evaluation Toolset (HBET). We asked Lee to share his experience in licensing and using HBET.
What can you tell us about your work related to fish passage and hydropower?
My team is really interested in the interactions between the hydraulic conditions within turbines and how that relates to fish injury and survival. This means we are often called to perform work that relates to shear stress, barotrauma, and physical strike associated with passage through river infrastructure. We are also very interested in aspects of upstream and downstream fish passage pathways across all life stages (including eggs and larvae). Our work is a combination of field-based trials, laboratory-based simulations, and computational predictive work (computational fluid dynamics models and mathematical modeling).
What is the reason you pursued licensing HBET?
One of the tools we frequently use is Sensor Fish. This is a “robotic” fish simulation device, which contains a pressure sensor, gyroscope, and accelerometer. Sensor Fish is a valuable tool for documenting the impacts of river infrastructure. It records 2,000 readings per second. When we deploy multiple Sensor Fish at a given site, we can generate huge amounts of data quickly. There is often an “optimal” number of deployments that need to take place in order to gain a statistically valid dataset that makes sure the work is scientifically defensible. HBET fills both of these requirements, which is why we purchased a license.
How has the HBET toolset improved your work or understanding about fish passage and hydropower?
HBET allows detailed processing of Sensor Fish data. We can identify strike events and shear events and predict barotrauma. These are essential when we try to relate hydraulic conditions to fish survival. HBET includes scenarios from many different study sites across the world. Users have contributed data, which adds to the veracity of the HBET outputs. We can input data from the Mekong, Australia, North America, or Europe for a long list of species, and HBET can predict mortality for a range of situations after we input Sensor Fish data.
HBET also has a function to improve experimental designs. We can input the various parameters of the site we are studying, and HBET runs a statistical algorithm to tell us how many Sensor Fish deployments we need to have a statistically valid design that predicts the hydraulic conditions with high confidence. That helps us budget for how many Sensor Fish we need. It also tells us when we need to stop deploying Sensor Fish because we have enough data.
What advantages or benefits does HBET provide for researchers like yourself?
HBET saves us time and provides scientific accuracy. We don’t need to perform complex analysis because HBET already does it for us. We also know that HBET is the culmination of many years' work by people at the forefront of fish and hydropower research, so have substantial confidence in the product and its outcomes.
How has the HydroPASSAGE technical team helped you with using HBET?
The HydroPASSAGE team always respond rapidly to any enquiries and are willing to assist via email, phone, or Zoom. We have collaborated on many occasions with the HydroPASSAGE team and are constantly developing new, innovative project ideas. We have collaboratively used HBET to analyze and interpret data. This has even extended to co-publishing in international journals. The team are very professional and knowledgeable, and we enjoy working with them on many levels.
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