Columbia River Basin Research Facility

Located in North Bonneville, Washington near the Bonneville Dam and the Columbia River, the Fisheries Engineering Team (FET), of the Engineer Research and Development Center Environmental Laboratory, conducts fish passage investigations in support of Portland and Walla Walla Districts' Anadromous Fish Evaluation Program and Seattle Districts' Lake Washington General Investigation Study. The FET uses state-of-the-art hydroacoustic, video, and acoustic camera systems to monitor and evaluate juvenile salmon passage at Corps hydropower dams within the Columbia River Basin and a navigation lock on the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle, WA. The FET has extensive experience evaluating behavioral technologies (e.g., sound and light) and has developed capabilities for characterizing complex flow fields using Doppler-based instrumentation. Additionally, the FET is developing a sophisticated computational tool that integrates hydrodynamic and aquatic biological concepts that will enable Computational Fluid Dynamics models to simulate detailed individual movements of fish species in three dimensions.