Fish Passage For Lake Sturgeon: A Literature Review

The health of aquatic ecosystems is dependent on healthy and diverse fish communities. Fragmentation of habitat, including the disruption of traditional migratory routes to spawning sites through barriers such as dams, adversely impacts the capacity of an ecosystem to support diverse fish communities. Fish passage may be used as a mitigation strategy of those impacts. Fish passage for Lake Sturgeon ( Acipenser fulvescens) is of particular relevance as sturgeon species have been identified as endangered in several of north American jurisdictions. However, passage design criteria for effective up- and downstream migration for sturgeon are not well established. Consequently, we conducted a comprehensive literature review and evaluated the efficiency of existing sturgeon passage to establish baseline information on what has been tested, overall effectiveness, design limitations, and knowledge gaps. Our primary objective was to determine the most effective methods to provide passage for sturgeon at man-made barriers and dams; i.e., what design parameters allow safe up- and downstream passage at the site of either a proposed or an existing barrier. A systematic review and meta-analysis focused on combining and contrasting results from different studies in order to identify patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, and to discover other interesting relationships that came to light in the context of analyzing multiple studies.