
Australian governments spend millions of dollars to conserve aquatic biodiversity and fisheries threatened by water-resource development, but outcomes are poor when dams or weirs block fish migrations. Migrations essential for fish biodiversity, productivity and viability are obstructed by tens of thousands of barriers. Existing high fishways are unsatisfactory.
Current approaches using fishways, locks and lifts vary in their success but all are costly. For example the fish lift on Tallowa Dam on the Shoalhaven River cost $48 million. The UNSW Tube Fishway Project is developing cost-effective techniques to provide fish passage over high (>8m) barriers, with considerable promise for more ambitious applications.
Approach
There are two key elements: fish attraction into a pipe chamber; and, safe fish transport through a vertical riser. The attraction design concept involves applying existing fishways’ knowledge to attract free-swimming fish into a chamber. The transport process utilizes the acceleration of flows in the tube system to move the chamber contents, with the fish, vertically through a riser pipe at near atmospheric pressure and over the dam wall.
Progress to date
A one-third-scale physic...





- The next steps
- References
- Our team
- For further information
- With funding support from the Department of Primary Industries New South Wales Recreational Fishing Trust, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne Philanthropic Foundation and the Carthew Foundation, the fish attraction and fish lifting technologies are presently being combined.
- In parallel, extensive laboratory tests for optimising fish attraction are undertaken with various fish species to investigate the scalability of the tube fishway.
- Some funding for field deployment of this technology has been secured.
- Field demonstrations will commence once our present laboratory program is complete.
Harris, J H, Peirson, W L, Mefford B, Kingsford, R T and Felder, S (2019) Pumping fish upstream over dams: an innovative pump fishway concept. J. Ecohydraulics, published online 04/11/2019.
Our team
Adjunct Prof Bill Peirson
Dam engineering & fluid control
Adjunct Assoc Prof John Harris
River ecology & freshwater fish
Prof Richard Kingsford
River & wetland ecology
Prof Iain Suthers
Fish biology & behaviour
A/Prof Stefan Felder
Hydraulic structures & aerated flow
Reilly Cox
PhD candidate
Hiruni Kammanankada
PhD candidate
Please contact:
Dr Stefan Felder | Associate Professor | s.felder@wrl.unsw.edu.au