Panel: Discussion of Fish Collection Methods for Head of Tide FERC Licensed Projects.

German, Ben¹, Ken Sprankle², Matt Devine³, Ben Gahagan⁴, Theodore Castro-Santos⁵, ¹NOAA Fisheries, GARFO, Gloucester, ²USFWS, Sunderland, MA, ³UMass Amherst, Amherst, MA, ⁴MA DMF, Gloucester, MA, ⁵USGS, Montague, MA

Three federally licensed hydropower projects, Lawrence (FERC # 2800), Cataract (FERC # 2528), and Brunswick (FERC # 2284) are the first barriers on the Merrimack, Saco, and Androscoggin Rivers, respectively. Each project will commence licensing in the next decade providing a once in a lifetime opportunity to improve fish passage and protection measures for diadromous species. All of these projects provide upstream fish passage for diadromous fish (Blueback Herring, Alewife, American Shad, Sea Lamprey, American Eel), but likely have poor efficiency, lack capacity, and cause migratory delay. Studies will be required to determine these impacts and provide the factual record for improvements to these fishways during the new license. State and federal resource agencies need to determine how to capture and tag fish for these studies to determine fishway efficiency, migratory delay, and estimate the population of target species approaching the project. NMFS is currently seeking guidance from AFS-SNEC on the appropriate methodology for these efforts. In this presentation, we will cover lessons learned from recent license proceedings at head-of-tide hydroelectric projects, describe the facilities seeking a new license, and describe some of the issues we face in building our administrative record to appropriately condition the new license. (The proposed format is a 1-hour roundtable discussion)