Thursday, April 23, 2009 10:19 PM CDT
Experts map whitewater
for best fish
environment
ONEIDA, Tenn. (AP) — There were plenty of rapids, but this was no recreational whitewater run. With $20,000 worth of camera equipment on board, there was a strong incentive to remain upright.
Think of it as cartography from a kayak.
In the lead boat was an underwater video camera and a surface video camera that ran continuously while Bryan McConkey, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee, paddled down North White Oak Creek.
Following in the second kayak was Paul Ayers, a professor of biosystems engineering and soil science at UT who is working with the National Park Service to develop 21st-century maps of the streams of the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area and the Obed Wild and Scenic River.
The purpose of the stream mapping is to identify good habitat for freshwater mussels and rare fishes. The project uses an innovative underwater video system that takes Global Positioning System (GPS) digital data and stores it continuously on the audio track of the DVD as the kayak floats down river.
Simultaneously, the river’s surface features are recorded using a similar geo-referenced video camera. Images from both video cameras are downloaded into a Geographic Information System (GIS) to produce digital maps that depict the stream in minute detail, above and below the surface.
A recent morning found McConkey and Ayers on North White Oak Creek, on the Fentress and Scott County side of the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. Following alongside from the old railroad bed that parallels the stream was J.R. Candlish, another one of Ayers’ graduate students.
Candlish had a walkie-talkie, and it was his job to scout the rapids from the bank for any dangerous obstacles.
So far, Ayers and his grad students have shot video of two-thirds of the streams in the Obed and Big South Fork. Both areas are managed by the National Park Service to protect their free-flowing waters. In the Big South Fork, that means 77 miles of the Big South Fork River and about 470 miles of tributaries.
The kayak also was equipped with a sonar depth finder, as well as a laser device that indicates the scale of substrate features, everything from rocks down to particles of sand.
Steve Bakaletz, biologist for the Big South Fork, said the aquatic habitat maps will be of particular help in managing the park’s 10 species of freshwater mussels listed as federally endangered.
“This technology gives us dimensions for all kinds of data,” Bakaletz said. “We not only know there’s a riffle, but also how deep it is and what’s on the bottom.“
From the video footage shot so far, biologists already know that the deepest pool in the Big South Fork is 60 feet deep, and that the average depth of nearly all the polls is 35 feet.
Five habitat attributes are gleaned from the video footage: flow characteristics of the river (pool, run, riffle); the type of substrate (slab rock, cobble, gravel, sand or silt); the embeddedness of the substrate; the presence of coal contamination; and river depth.
Historically, the Big South Fork River inside the park contained 71 species of mussels. Today, 26 mussel species live in the river, along with three species of federally endangered fish.
The video footage taken from the kayak presents a virtual tour of the stream. Advocates of the system say it’s an inexpensive way to map long stretches of river, and it’s a lot quicker than snorkeling with an underwater camera.
“In the old days, maps were one-dimensional lines on a piece of paper,” Bakaletz said. “Now, we can superimpose layers like transparencies in a biology book. It’s like Huckleberry Finn going digital.“
Information from: The Knoxville News Sentinel, http://www.knoxnews.com
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