California Department of Fish and Game Announces Fish Passage Reference Database Now Available on the Web

Department of Fish and Game biologists, managers, engineers and others have a new tool for fisheries management. It is an online database of citations of current and historic literature on the technical aspects of fish passage including engineering, biology, design and other relevant disciplines.

The American Society of Civil Engineers Environmental and Water Resources Institute (ASCE/EWRI)-American Fisheries Society Bioengineering Section (AFS/BES) Partnership Development Ad Hoc Committee announced the availability of the Joint EWRI-AFS Fish Passage Reference Database last week at Fish Passage 2012, a national meeting in Massachusetts.

The EWRI-AFS Partnership Development Ad Hoc Committee, chaired by DFG Engineer Marcin Whitman, has created this database as part of its goal to develop initiatives for new projects to facilitate the transfer of fish passage information and technology. The database includes compilations of existing literature databases and bibliographies from multiple sources, both published and unpublished (i.e., reports, gray literature). It is intended to be a clearinghouse for new literature as it becomes available. The database will provide a resource for use by fishery biologists, managers, engineers and people in both the public and private sectors seeking information about fish passage.

“This database represents many hours of work by the committee as well as fiscal donations by ASCE, the Bureau of Reclamation, University of Massachusetts and others,” said Whitman. “This group has been the highest-performing professional volunteer group I have ever worked with and we hope this will serve as a useful resource to promote fish passage.”

The database can be accessed via http://scholarworks.umass.edu/fishpassage/. Database users may search for citations (many with accompanying abstracts) using author, journal and/or subject keywords, and may add new citations to the database through the Scholarworks web portal.

To enhance the effectiveness of the database and its repository function, practitioners in fish passage can also add records to the database using the “author’s corner” on the Fish Passage Reference Database website.

Support for the database was provided by the University of Massachusetts Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Hydraulic Investigations and Laboratory Services Group, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Region 5) and the U.S. Geological Survey S.O. Conte Anadromous Fish Research Laboratory.