The team discovered that these large, ancient fish make a unique underwater noise during spawning season, which they dubbed “sturgeon thunder.� By listening for this sound, scientists can identify when and where sturgeon are present without ever having to see them.

This innovative research was a collaboration between ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Cornell University, and other partners. It shows how new acoustic technology can help scientists monitor and protect sensitive fish species more effectively, supporting better conservation and management efforts.

You can read more about this study .

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Suresh A. Sethi, Director of AREAC at ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ, along with an international team, recently published a study in examining the environmental and social impacts of Amazonian aquaculture. Their research looks at key issues such as threats to biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and the livelihoods of local communities.

The article outlines a roadmap for developing aquaculture in a way that supports food production, protects local ecosystems, and ensures fair social outcomes in one of the world’s richest freshwater biodiversity regions.

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¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ’s Suresh A. Sethi, director of the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center and associate professor of Earth and environmental science, is advancing data science tools to harness tagging data to support fish and wildlife population assessments. Sethi and an international team of collaborators, spanning universities and government agencies from the United States, Canada, Norway, Portugal, and Spain, have developed a suite of new modeling approaches to estimate the survival of tagged animals across space and over time.

Their work has been published in a trio of papers over the past year in the prestigious journals Scientific Reports and Methods in Ecology and Evolution:

• ), the authors demonstrate how miniaturized tagging technology can be used to estimate the survival of small juvenile fish.
• , the authors break down survival over time into sequential stages that can reflect complex injury and recovery dynamics of fish and wildlife.
• , the authors develop spatial models that can characterize mortality risks for fish and wildlife across landscapes and seascapes.

While the team’s work is focused on animal populations, these data science approaches represent general advancements in survival modeling that can support a wide range of applications, including uses in medical science, economics, and engineering. Their work is already making impacts, with new collaborations underway to estimate survival of fish through dams, to assess the ability of marine reserves to protect fish populations, and to assess handling injuries for game birds.

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¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ’s Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center (AREAC) Director Suresh A. Sethi and Professor Brad Harris from Alaska Pacific University recently co-chaired a working group at the 2024 World Fisheries Congress in Seattle to assemble fisheries managers, fishing industry participants, ocean conservation organizations, and fisheries scientists to synthesize knowledge needs required by policymakers to operationalize advancements in trawl fisheries sustainability.

The group identified key knowledge gaps currently facing trawl fishery decision-makers, and identified over 50 recommendations to operationalize trawl fishery sustainability advancements moving forward. This effort has solidified an international network spanning science, management, and conservation professionals seeking to develop solutions and advance action to improve bottom-towed fisheries sustainability. Support for the workshop was provided by the University of Washington Center for Sustaining Seafood and by the Alaska Pacific University Fisheries, Aquatic Science, and Technology Lab.

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These saildrones have been deployed across the Great Lakes and are returning data that are being used to assess the abundance and spatial distribution of fish. The wind-powered drones are silent and are helping to address long-standing questions in fisheries surveys, such as observing whether fish respond to conventional motorized survey ship noise in a manner that could bias abundance estimates.

Sethi attended a recent workshop in December in Ithaca, New York, where the group discussed moving to the next phase of drone-based acoustics by collaborating with computer science colleagues to automate data processing for the large amounts of information generated by surface drones.

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In a recent paper in Scientific Reports, the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center’s (AREAC) director Suresh A. Sethi and colleagues demonstrate how small acoustic tags and whole lake monitoring can be used to estimate the survival of stocked juvenile fish. In a collaboration with the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, Cornell, and USGS to restore extirpated native Cisco (Coregonus artedi) in the Finger Lakes to improve ecosystem resilience, the work shows that tagging technology now exists to achieve survival estimates of fish as small as 6g in size. This important work led by Ph.D. student Alex Koeberle advances tools available to improve the success of fish reintroductions.

The paper can be read .

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AREAC is a hands-on experimentation laboratory and a center of innovation for aquatic ecosystem sustainability science. Themes at AREAC include:

• Fisheries and aquaculture science;
• Environmental assessment and management;
• Biology and ecophysiology of aquatic organisms.

The post AREAC Director to Serve as the NY State Representative on Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Committee on Economic and Social Science appeared first on ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ.

Sethi’s work spans scales from laboratory experiments to inform the ecology of aquatic species, to commercial fisheries management science, to global biodiversity conservation. Before joining ¿ÉÀÖÊÓƵ, he was faculty in the NY Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Cornell University, and he previously served as the Alaska Region statistician for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

AREAC is a hands-on experimentation laboratory and a center of innovation for aquatic ecosystem sustainability science. Themes at AREAC include:

• Fisheries and aquaculture science;
• Environmental assessment and management;
• Biology and ecophysiology of aquatic organisms.

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