October 30, 2013 — The following was released by the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center:
One day every other week for much of the year, Mike O’Malley, a fisheries scientist at NOAA's Orono Field Station, places his acoustics gear into an open 19-foot aluminum skiff named the Silver Smolt at Turtle Head Marina in Hampden, near Bangor, and heads downriver to Fort Point on the lower Penobscot River estuary. For the next six hours or so, he monitors fish biomass in the estuary using hydroacoustics, a low cost, non-intrusive way to monitor the system on a large scale. Using this approach, scientists can obtain baseline data for some of the restoration efforts underway to remove dams and restore fish habitat. Changes induced by these efforts may first be detected in the estuary.
Click here to read the full release from NOAA