A Fisheries Information Management System for Petabyte Scale Telemetry

Since 2004 the Juvenile Salmonid Acoustic Telemetry System (JSATS) cabled array and autonomous node systems have been deployed in the Columbia River Basin to provide survival estimates and understand fish passage.  In 2012, our 23 “data systems” produced almost a petabyte of raw data.  Data systems include 84 autonomous nodes and 90 acquisition systems for dam-faced cabled arrays which provide presence absences and 3D positioning of fish in front of the hydropower facility.  Cabled array data acquisition systems continually collected data from April through August.  Real-time processing software processes acoustic signals to reduce post-processing time.  Given the distance between, and number of systems, cellular modems notify a central monitoring system of potential system issues.  System downtime and fish detections are coordinated with dam operations data, run at large estimates, environmental measurements, and fish condition data.  Fish condition data includes run of the river and tagged fish comparisons as well as photographing each fish used in the study.  In 2012, approximately 65,000 photographs were taken, archived and used for reporting to management agencies.  We present a fisheries information management system for large studies that can facilitate future spatiotemporal meta-data analysis to support management of hydropower systems.