Difficult Similarities: Sampling with Fisheries Acoustics in Cobscook Bay, Maine and the Ugashik Lakes, Alaska

While the physical act of collecting data for fisheries research is rarely easy and without complication, some physical environments pose specific and extreme challenges.  Often there are major logistical difficulties in just accessing a certain ecosystem notwithstanding collecting valid and meaningful data.  Remote locations often require air travel which restricts size and amounts of gear.  Active fisheries acoustics is particularly adaptable for sampling difficult ecosystems because of its portability and potential for high spatial and/or temporal resolution.  We discuss two applications of active fisheries acoustics.  We will describe general difficulties and specifics to studies in Maine and Alaska.  Cobscook Bay, Maine is near populated areas, has extreme water currents from tides, and was sampled seasonally over 4 years using stationary methods.  The Ugashik Lakes, Alaska is remote, has extreme weather patterns, and was sampled for 4 summers using mobile transects.  While there were certain challenges that both locales had in common (difficult bodies of water), there were also differences between these locations (diel variation).  Lastly, physical fish sampling in these environments was challenging yet we acknowledge its requirement for fisheries acoustics surveys and will address how we approached this.