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\f0\fs24 \cf0 We're here at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst at the Fish Passage
twenty-eleven Conference, a great conference. We've got many countries represented here,
we've got twenty-eight states, we have a lot of attendees and great presentations about
the science and technology that is ever emerging for fish passage. \
\ This conference is the very first of its kind.
Its an opportunity for people all across the U.S. - in fact we had representatives from
thirty-two different states - to come together to discuss the progress we've made in terms
of fish passage engineering and to plan the future.\
\ Well, this conference has brought together
over three-hundred people that are involved in fish passage engineering and fisheries
and biology and water resources and allowed them to share information and gain insights
from each other's work to see their successes and discuss the problems that we all face
in trying to solve this problem. \ \
So I was asked to come in and be a preliminary speaker, I was also giving a presentation.
My main interest is I'm just interested in us doing more conferences like this, more
fish passage focus conferences, because my main focus is fisheries engineering and we
don't have a lot of times to network and bring people together on this subject and I think
we need to do a better job with that nationally and definitely within the Northeast and get
to the point where we, not only we can see what other people are doing, what's working
and what's not working, we can exchange information better. \
\ And so yeah, its extremely important for a
conference like this, in my mind, for us to start a dialogue of what technologies are
going on across the country, how people fund things, how people build things, you know,
lessons learned, what's worked, what's failed. Is there an opportunity that with some slight
modifications from my systems out West that the things that folks do out here might work
better and might cover a wider range of species? So this kind of information exchange is really
important and its also important, at least for me personally, because I'm a fish biologist,
I'm not an engineer, and I don't have an engineer in my region on staff specifically with the
Fish and Wildlife Service. I work with a lot of great engineers from other agencies, but
its very important for me to come to a conference like this where I think we get the fish biologists
trying to get a little more technical and learn some of the engineering and we've got
a lot of the engineers really trying to help get some of their very specific discipline,
you know, and very technical details out to us in a way that we can understand and I think
this week's been fantastic for that sort of information exchange between the two disciplines,
\ \
That's where the evolution has come, its the merger of all of these different disciplines.
Its become a multidisciplinary approach involving the communications part, but also the social
science aspect of it. We are now looking at work with communities and communities are
getting involved and reaping the benefits of fish passage projects. And therefore, in
the future I see even a further merger of all of those capacities so that we accomplish
further our goals. }