How BioBase is Helping Fish Conservation

BioBase EcoSound is helping State Fisheries Departments and Research Institutions across the US and UK to better manage Fisheries by providing important information about fish habitat.  See below for a short description of these ongoing investigations.Precision bathymetric mapping to estimate concentrations of a fish toxin (rotenone) to kill invasive fish in a Nebraska backwater lake. … Continue reading “How BioBase is Helping Fish Conservation”

BioBase EcoSound is helping State Fisheries Departments and Research Institutions across the US and UK to better manage Fisheries by providing important information about fish habitat.  See below for a short description of these ongoing investigations.

Continue reading “How BioBase is Helping Fish Conservation”

Helpful Lowrance Hints: Depth Tracking

We promote BioBase as an automated “easy-button” solution for creating aquatic maps, but unfortunately, mobile acoustic data collection is not something you can push a button and forget about and expect perfect results.  Like using most other sophisticated instrumentation, users need to monitor that the instruments are performing as expected and sometimes make adjustments if they aren’t.

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BioBase Project Propels Jeff Schuckman to Nebraska Game and Parks Employee of the Year!

Lake Yankton, a 332-acre backwater lake on the Nebraska/South Dakota border had a problem. In the summer of 2011, the Missouri River flooded, spilling into the lake a number of undesirable invasive rough fish, including large numbers of carp (silver, bighead, grass, and common), smallmouth buffalo, and gizzard shad. Notorious for stirring up lake bottoms while feeding and spawning — and for overeating zooplankton and aquatic plants — these species degrade water quality and fisheries.  

Overrun by these invasive species, Lake Yankton soon looked like chocolate milk, with a water clarity of only three inches — that’s right, inches, not feet.  So the cavalry was called in to assess the situation and provide a solution. Leading the effort was Nebraska Game and Parks Commission District Fisheries Manager Jeff Schuckman.

Fortunately for Nebraska anglers, this wasn’t Schuckman’s first rodeo. He knew the lake could be rehabilitated with careful application of Rotenone, a common fish-killing chemical. The challenge would be to determine just how much of the chemical was needed, and then purchase and apply just enough to do the job — no more, no less.

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BioBase Helps Manage Honeoye Lake Macrophyte Harvesting Program

Guest Blog By Terry R. Gronwall, Chairman of the Honeoye Lake Watershed Task Force (Honeoye, NY)
Honeoye Lake is one of the smaller (~1,800 acres) Finger Lakes in Upstate New York.  We have been managing our macrophyte population by using a harvester for about 25 years.  The objective of our harvesting program is to both provide relief for the recreational lake users and to remove biomass containing phosphorus from the lake every summer.  We average around 800 wet tons of biomass removed per season.

When we learned about ciBiobase we saw this service as a way to make our macrophyte harvesting operation more efficient by concentrating our efforts on areas in the lake that have macrophytes growing through most of the water column.  This is shown as the red zone on our macrophyte maps.  We plan to monitor our actual harvesting rates relative to our macrophyte maps over the summer harvesting season to see if we achieve our goal of increased productivity.

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BioBase 3 Step Process: Important Details!

A primary strength of BioBase EcoSound is its simplicity and that is reflected in the easy 3 step process of “Collect,” “Upload,” and “Analyze” (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The core process of EcoSound depicting the 3 Steps of “Collect,” “Upload,” and “Analyze.”

But there are many strategies that users can employ that will ensure that they will get the best EcoSound outputs possible.  We’ll focus on several questions under each of the three categories

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CHIRP from a bottom mapping perspective

Maybe you’ve been hearing about this term in sonar circles called “Chirp” and noticing that most consumer sonar units now come with Chirp capability. Indeed, Chirp is a game changer for more precise definition of acoustic targets suspended from bottom (e.g., fish) and the technology is helping more anglers find fish in a wide range of aquatic environments (Figure 1).  But what does Chirp mean for mapping the bottom of waterbodies?  Does it provide any advantages or disadvantages over traditional 200 kHz frequency broadband sonar that is the foundation of Insight Genesis and BioBase
EcoSound mapping services?  Here we take a brief look at Chirp, explain what it is, and present some findings from preliminary tests in a couple of different lake environments.

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Offset Tool and Public Water Databases to Create Accurate Depth Maps

One of the best features of BioBase EcoSound and its sister technology for anglers, C-MAP Genesis, is the ability to aggregate partial maps created over time into a complete map later.  The recent blog post on Ten Mile Lake in Minnesota, USA, details a notable example of the power of aggregation.  However, changing water levels over the course of time can impact the accuracy of aggregated maps if recorded water depths are not offset against a standard benchmark water elevation.

Continue reading “Offset Tool and Public Water Databases to Create Accurate Depth Maps”

Transect Design: Consideration of Scale

One of the most frequently asked questions by BioBase EcoSound users is, “how far apart should I space my transects for creating maps?”  Although as always, the most appropriate response is: “it depends,” we still offer solutions below that cover the most common use case scenarios.  We thank our partners at NC State University Department of Crop and Soil Science for contributing useful data from Waccamaw Lake in North Carolina USA.

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Citizen Lake Mapping: Power of Aggregation!

Ten Mile Lake in Hackensack, Minnesota is one of many crown jewel lakes of Minnesota.  It’s no wonder the Ten Mile Lake Association is serious about lake monitoring and conservation.  When BioBase approached TMLA member and hobby Fisheries Biologist Dr. Bruce Carlson in late 2012 demonstrating how members could passively log their sonar data and map habitat while enjoying a pleasure cruise or fishing, Dr. Carlson jumped at the opportunity.

Two hundred and twenty four trips spanning two seasons (2013-2014) and 5,065 acres (2,049 ha) later, Dr. Carlson and colleagues have produced the most accurate and detailed map of Ten Mile Lake on the planet (Figure 1)!

Figure 1. Track lines from 224 Lowrance sonar logs uploaded to BioBase and merged (left) and resultant contour map (right) produced automatically for Ten Mile Lake, Hackensack, MN USA.  Ten Mile Lake is a 208-ft (63-m) deep lake with 16-ft (5-m) clarity.

When comparing the hand-made maps of 1947 from the long-dissolved MN Dept of Conservation one has to wonder if creating this map took a dedicated and highly trained survey crew all summer to create this map (Figures 2-4)?  Now a critical mass of anglers or pleasure boaters with no mapping experience can create a community-sourced contour map that rivals anything produced by the most trained hydrologists using the most expensive “survey-grade” echosounders.

Figure 2. Original map of Ten Mile Lake created in 1947 by the MN Department of Conservation (left) next to the aggregated map produced by TMLA volunteers in 2014 after uploading to BioBase.  Maps created in the mid 20th Century remain the only maps offered to anglers and recreationists by a large number State Natural Resource agencies. Often these old maps are digitized and artfully recontoured and shaded for resale.
Figure 3. Close up of the 10-ft contours displayed in the 1947 Department of Conservation map compared with the 2014 aggregated map created by TMLA volunteer uploads to BioBase.
Figure 4. Tight zoom of 10-ft contours from 1947 MN Department of Conservation map (ink blob on top) compared with 3-ft contours from aggregated map created by TMLA volunteer uploads to BioBase.

Not just an improvement in aesthetics!
The efforts of TMLA and volunteers from other Lake Associations across the US (e.g., Lake Paradise, Honeoye, Prior Lake) are producing not only pretty maps but also updated digital maps for the public and highly detailed fish habitat and aquatic plant data for aquatic researchers and managers.

First, public trips uploaded and aggregated both from BioBase and C-MAP Genesis mapping services from anywhere across the globe go to Social Map where they are available for viewing and downloading for free to Lowrance, Simrad, and B&G chartplotters (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5.  Insight Genesis Social Map coverage of Sweden.

 

Figure 6. Example map of Anten (Sweden) as viewed from Insight Genesis social map.  Professionals (BioBase) and Anglers (Insight Genesis) can community-source their mapping efforts to “fill-in” unmapped areas and create up to date digital maps for the public.

Second, Fisheries across the globe are threatened by a range of impacts too long to go into detail here and Aquatic Invasive Species are a global pandemic.  Researchers and managers mourn the decline of native aquatic species and often target habitat degradation or loss as a primary driver.  But rarely does information on habitat match the detail of the information on species declines. Citizen Scientists are now helping Natural Resource Agencies fill in the habitat knowledge gaps.  Returning to our example on Ten Mile Lake, now with updated bathymetry provided by TMLA volunteers and data sharing with MN Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Fisheries researchers have precise knowledge about how much cold, well oxygenated water is available for cisco (an important cold-water forage fish for popular gamefish).  Similarly, thanks to the efforts of the Prior Lake Spring Lake Watershed District and citizen volunteers on Prior and Spring Lakes, the response of invasive aquatic plants to watershed and in-lake management actions can be monitored.

Harnessing the power of technology and citizen science to conserve aquatic resources
“Doing more with less” or “working smarter not harder” are common cliché truths that will continue to limit the reach of publicly funded natural resource management programs into the foreseeable future. Through advances in affordable off-the-shelf consumer technology, automation, and the collective enthusiasm of citizen volunteers, good information on aquatic habitat need’nt suffer from declining public natural resource budgets.  Rather, by enrolling the help of citizens and technology such as described here, aquatic biologists and managers can focus their energies on using the information to make wise aquatic resource management decisions.

Recently Published: Aquatic Plant Dominance and BioBase

We are happy to report the first BioBase-focused paper finally published in the peer-reviewed literature:  “Combining hydroacoustic and point-intercept survey methods to assess aquatic plant species abundance patterns and community dominance.” The paper is co-authored by Navico staff and researchers from Minnesota (Donna Dustin), Florida (Dean Jones), and North Carolina (Justin Nawrocki) and published in the January 2015 issue of the Journal of Aquatic Plant Management.  The paper describes a simple technique for combining aquatic plant species presence/absence information with detailed aquatic plant abundance metrics processed by BioBase [EcoSound] from Lowrance sonar logs to generate detailed information on what aquatic plant species are dominating a mapped lake.  The technique has the potential to greatly advance our understanding of the conditions that cause invasive aquatic plants to “take-over” (a colloquial term for dominate) lakes and provide an objective benchmark from which to evaluate aquatic plant management interventions.

Below is the abstract.  Please contact corresponding author Ray Valley (ray.valley@navico.com) if you are interested in a copy of the paper.

Many ecosystem goods and services are derived from aquatic plant–dominated environments and the abundance and composition of aquatic plant communities affects habitat, recreation, angling, aesthetics, and commerce. We describe standardized hydroacoustic methodology that complements species composition surveys and generates comprehensive aquatic plant abundance data with little additional assessment or analysis effort than is already put forth for species surveys. Using data from 22 lakes across the United States, collected by biologists with varying levels of expertise, we compare hydroacoustically derived biovolume with two other semiquantitative measures of whole-lake abundance (frequency of occurrence and ‘‘rake fullness’’). Although we documented some significant correlations between hydroacoustically derived biovolume and frequency and rake fullness, frequency or rake fullness was difficult to interpret biologically on a lakewide scale. We also describe a dominance index that incorporates both species composition and vegetation biovolume to evaluate the degree that a species dominates a local assemblage. We found that the extent of aquatic plant growth and invasive dominance was related to lake productivity with highest biovolume and dominance occurring in mesotrophic to eutrophic study lakes. Using both empirical and simulated data, we also found no significant differences between dominance calculated from a simple metric that gives equal weight to all species at a survey site and a metric that incorporated rake fullness for each species.

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