Sensing Technologies and Animal Tracking: Tech Demo 2 in the Innovation Power House

To better understand fish and wildlife behavior and characterize the physical conditions they experience when encountering complex structures, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed a suite of technologies and software.

The suite includes some of the most advanced, small, and lightweight tags that can be used to study species or life stages that could not be done previously.

Examples include:

— An acoustic tag that is only 0.05 gram for studying sensitive species of fish like American shad and delta smelts
— Lab-on-a-Fish, the world’s first biotelemetry sensor that simultaneously evaluates and monitors the health, behavior, and environment of fish or small aquatic species
— Radio-frequency tags for birds and bats with a weight of 0.15 grams or with detection ranges of 30 kilometers

We have also developed an autonomous sensor system known as Sensor Fish to characterize the physical stressors through complex structures to understand impacts to fish.

In addition, we have developed advanced 3D tracking algorithms to accurately localize aquatic and terrestrial species for our tag technology and a comprehensive toolset to design and execute new studies and understand the impact to many fish species for the Sensor Fish technology.