Fishway Design and Development: New Challenges, Tools and Applications
A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Hydraulics and Hydrodynamics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 April 2025 | Viewed by 57
Special Issue Editors
Interests: ecohydraulics; fishways; computational fluid dynamics (CFD); hydrodynamic modelling; fish passage; hydraulics and water resources; river restoration and management; river connectivity
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: fish passage; ecohydraulics; fish ecology; aquatic sciences; river connectivity; river restoration and management; fishways; fish migration; freshwater biology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: river restoration and management; river connectivity; ecohydraulics; fish ecology; fish passage; invasive alien species (IAS)
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Fishways are one of the main solutions to mitigate the impacts of anthropogenic barriers, as they allow fish to move up and downstream while maintaining the weirs and dams’ basic functions. If adequately designed, fishways can provide a bidirectional migration facility and enhance ecosystem services. Over recent years much effort has been devoted to fishway research, nonetheless, several challenges remain unsolved while new ones emerge.
Guaranteeing suitable hydrodynamic conditions while accounting for the variability between species, individuals and life stages is quite challenging since attractiveness and passage efficiency depend on the interactions between physical, biological, and environmental variables. So, assuring the effective use of fishways at the community scale, especially for smaller-sized individuals with weaker swimming capacities, and less studied native species, is vital. To pass different fish species and life-stages in fishways, given the different swimming mechanics and life-cycle requirements is therefore the crucial challenge. Further research is needed on the interplay between hydrodynamic conditions, swimming abilities, migration preferences and behaviour inside fishways since considerable knowledge gaps remain, particularly for small-bodied fishes.
Re-establishing river connectivity while preventing the spread of invasive alien species (IAS) is more of a challenge, thus achieving selective fishways that favour native species passage while preventing IAS dispersion is key.
Moreover, with climate change, droughts and floods of exceptional severity are increasingly likely to occur, thus, water resources will become progressively strained, reinforcing the importance of designing adaptable and cost-effective fishways, efficient for a range of discharges.
Recent developments in methods, tools, and devices to measure and simulate the hydrodynamics downstream and along the fishway and to assess fish passage behaviour allow for new insights into the design and retrofit of fishways creating an opportunity for its enhancement.
This Special Issue highly encourages contributions on fundamental and applied research combining different fish passage research fields, like engineering, ecohydraulics, fluid dynamics, biology, ecology and physiology ranging from hydrodynamic modelling and laboratory experiments to field studies.
Dr. Ana L. Quaresma
Dr. Filipe Romão
Dr. Susana Dias Amaral
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- fish passage
- Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
- hydrodynamic modelling
- holistic fishway
- attractiveness
- effectiveness
- invasive alien species (IAS)
- pool-type fishway
- nature like fishway
- vertical slot fishway
- fish lift
- fish lock
- climate change
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