Smart fishways: real-time sensorization of fishways for autonomous assessment and management of their performance

Modern society requires large volumes of fresh water. The result is the installation of multiple river barriers, causing the fragmentation of riverine habitats as well as changes in the ecology of freshwater ecosystems. When it comes to fish, stepped fishways are the most common solution to allow them to move freely through river barriers and complete their life cycles. However, the natural variability of rivers (e.g., discharge, floating debris, etc.) modifies the hydraulic conditions within these structures, directly affecting fish passage, and thus, it becomes vital for fish a real-time assessment and management of the fishway.

Smart Fishways is an EU-funded project which aims to assess the effect of hydrological variability on fishways and to develop a low-cost technological and methodological framework to monitor fishways' performance in real-time. The main objective of this project is to combine fish biology, hydraulics, and sensor networks to create a new generation of smart fishways capable of self-deciding their optimal management and configuration.

The present paper describes the first steps followed to develop the sensor network and the online platform for the Smart Fishways project, together with the results of a fish migration campaign in a fishway in the Iberian Peninsula. The network follows a star architecture with independent custom-made ultrasonic water level nodes and environmental sensors distributed through the fishway together with a fish detection system for fish movement assessment, both remotely and autonomously managed by a central gateway. 

This work demonstrates how the network is able to optimize the timing of maintenance on a fishway in real-time as well as to help on detecting those hydraulic configurations and times that maximize the fish passage.