Research and analysis

Variability in mobile acoustic fish community assessment

The report investigates the robustness and range of current acoustic surveying methodology in order to improve on observed sampling variability.

• From: Environment Agency
• Published: 1 January 2002

Documents

Variability in Mobile Acoustic Fish Community Assessment

Ref: ISBN 1857058488, LIT 1568

PDF, 2.77 MB, 83 pages

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Details

Hydroacoustics is a cost-effective tool for surveying fish communities in large lowland rivers and lakes and will be a key element in providing temporal and spatial data for the national fisheries monitoring programme and the Water Framework Directive. However, deployment of sonar in horizontal mobile surveys is still in the developmental stage, and successive surveys on the same fish populations can produce very variable results. In addition, three types of echosounder are currently in use within the Environment Agency and comparisons between results obtained from different systems are difficult to conduct. In order to improve robustness of information obtained from horizontal hydroacoustic fisheries surveys, this project was commissioned to account for the observed sampling variability. Two potential sources of variability were examined:

• Differences between echosounders in operation.
• Variability due to key abiotic factors affecting fish behaviour.

Published 1 January 2002