| Short Course | Coordinators | Duration | Cost | Class Size |
| Fishway design and monitoring | Ana Lopes Quaresma Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal |
Full day | 150 € | 8 - 20 |
| Fish Telemetry | Pedro R. Almeida University of Évora, Portugal |
Full day | 150 € | 15 - 20 |
| Use of decision support tools for rapid barrier assessment and restoration of stream connectivity | Carlos Garcia de Leaniz Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research, Swansea University, UK |
Full day | 110 €* | 10 - 30 |
| Removing Dams throughout Europe | Laura Wildman New England Regional Office/ Princeton Hydro, USA |
Full day | 150 € | 10 - 40 |
| Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling for freshwater species: updates on the developments and applications to fish passage and aquatic connectivity |
Guillermo Giannico Rebecca Flitcroft Kevin McKelvey |
Full day | 150 € | 10 - 35 |
*Note: Bursaries are available to attend Course 3. Please click here to apply for a fee waiver (110EUR). You could also be eligible to claim up to 50 EUR towards travelling expenses.
Course 1: Fishway design and monitoring
Fishway design is complex and requires the knowledge of multiple scientific fields such as hydrology, hydraulic, biology, ecology, and civil engineering. This full-day short course will focus on technical and nature-like fishway design. An overview of fish passage solutions, design principles, and methodology, as well as fishway assessment and monitoring, will be addressed. These topics will be presented through lecture and team-based design exercises. The aim of this course is to give participants an overall look of the interdisciplinary scientific disciplines involved in the design, operation, and monitoring of fishway projects, benefiting engineers, biologists, hydrologists, environmental scientists, and other practitioners working in this field.
Advances in fish telemetry technology in the last two decades opened the possibility to study in detail complex behavior patterns, migrations movements and physiological profiles of many different species. Fish pass development and monitoring can take advantage of the information obtained using different types of telemetry techniques. The topics being covered on this full-day short course are: aquatic telemetry techniques used in fresh and brackish systems (e.g. radio, acoustic, PIT; DST), methodologies used in rivers and reservoirs, tagging procedures, experimental design and data analysis, and animal welfare and ethical requirements. The main sections will be illustrated with different cases studies.
Click here for a detailed schedule of the Fish Telemetry short course.
This one-day course will provide practical guidance on the use of various decision support tools (DSTs) for rapid assessment of barrier impacts and prioritization of restoration of connectivity. Using real case studies, the course takes a hands-on, pragmatic approach on how to prioritize restoration efforts in the absence of complete, or even reliable information, and will appeal to water resource managers, engineers and students of environmental impact assessment interested on fish passage and stream restoration. This full-day short course will cover barrier inventory and estimation of fragmentation, the use of DSTs for barrier prioritization and mitigation, and rapid barrier assessment (e.g. using telemetry) considering fish habitat.
Note: Bursaries are available to attend Course 3. Please click here to apply for a fee waiver (110EUR). You could also be eligible to claim up to 50 EUR towards travelling expenses.
Click here for a detailed schedule of the decision support tools short course.
Course 4: Removing Dams throughout Europe
This is a full-day short course for all professionals who are currently or may soon be involved in a dam removal project (engineers, biologists, hydrologists, environmental scientists, planners, project proponents, and managers). The seminar will focus on a European perspective on dam removal. We will discuss how dam removal projects are currently being prioritized, initiated, funded, investigated, designed, implemented, and monitored. Speakers from around Europe will share their experiences removing dams in their countries. The instructors will discuss the key project drivers, context, project management and planning, funding, engineering design, scientific analysis, the regulatory process, and construction methods that were utilized to complete these projects. We hope that through these parallel discussions participants become familiar with some of the many challenges, differences, and similarities of removing dams in Europe. The course will kick off by discussing some of the dam removal efforts and network building currently in the works in Europe, as well as by reviewing some of the key considerations and techniques when removing a dam (i.e. sediment management, socioeconomics, ecological impacts, infrastructure, etc.) and then move into the European case studies and lessons learned.
Effective conservation and management of freshwater species requires unprecedented levels of coordination and high-quality information to guide decision-making. Unfortunately, often simple data on species presence are lacking for many freshwater taxa, whether to describe a species' distribution in a single stream, throughout a river basin or across its range. A revolution in the assessment of aquatic species based on detecting their DNA in water samples — environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling —promises to overcome this impediment.
This full-day course will highlight the best applications of eDNA for addressing critical knowledge gaps related to freshwater species presence and distribution, with particular emphasis on passage issues for aquatic species. This workshop will encourage participants to explore applied eDNA scenarios that we will invite participants to submit. The objective of this course is to educate participants on the process of eDNA sample collection, analysis and interpretation (including issues of sample contamination and considerations for single species versus multi-species detections via technologies such as metabarcoding), while highlighting the primary advantages and current limitations of this tool. Content will include presentations by course instructors to provide context for understanding applications for eDNA tools, interactive engagement in groups to explore applied eDNA scenarios, and invited presentations by European scientists using eDNA tools.
