The Attractiveness of Fishways and Bypass Facilities

Abstract

This chapter deals with the conventional upstream fish passage technologies developed for a safe fish migration at run-of-river hydropower plants (HPPs). It covers the factors influencing successful migration, current status, practices and challenges, novel developments, recommendations and outlook. Main focusses of this chapter are on the attractiveness of fishways and bypass facilities based on FIThydro study results. Although upstream fish passage technologies are well developed, there are still research gaps on their effectiveness related to their attractiveness and passabilities. FIThydro fills such research gaps by providing tools, methods, devices and best practice examples. This chapter covers the field studies at the case study HPP Guma with pool and weir fishway in Spain and Schiffmühle with vertical-slot and nature-like fishways in Switzerland and a combination of field, laboratory and numerical simulation studies of vertical-slot fishway in France. The results of these three studies contribute to better fishway design for a range of fish species and hydraulic conditions.