Stakeholder Questionnaire on Fish Passage Facilities at U.S. Hydropower Developments

Technical Report · Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2026

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/3013506· OSTI ID:3013506

Bozeman, Bryan B. ^[1]; Oladosu, Gbadebo A. ^[1]; DeRolph, Christopher R. ^[1]; Singh, Debjani ^[1]; Matson, Paul G. ^[1]

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1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

To mitigate the environmental impacts of hydropower dams on fish populations in rivers, fish passage infrastructure may be required by regulatory authorities or recommended by state or federal agencies to allow migratory fish to pass hydropower barriers and complete their life histories. However, information on the location, types, and characteristics of fish passage infrastructure is incomplete at the national scale. This lack of information limits understanding of current fish passage capabilities and hinders efforts to anticipate future passage requirements during project licensing or relicensing. To address this knowledge gap, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory partnered with federal agency and industry stakeholders to create the first national-scale database of fish passage infrastructure at U.S. hydropower developments. As part of this effort, a stakeholder questionnaire was created and deployed to solicit information on fish passage infrastructure, including engineering characteristics, operational schedules, targeted species, and costs. This online questionnaire was designed to allow respondents to provide highly detailed information regarding fish passage capabilities at U.S. hydropower developments as efficiently as possible. The questionnaire improved database coverage and accuracy by providing valuable development- or passage-specific stakeholder knowledge that is not otherwise publicly available. However, questionnaire response rates were low, and stakeholders showed a preference for providing data via the spreadsheet template. This is likely because most stakeholders had high-level knowledge about fish passage existence and type at many features, and few stakeholders had highly detailed, feature-specific knowledge of fish passage infrastructure, cost, operational scheduling, and capabilities. Nonetheless, the development and deployment of the stakeholder questionnaire advanced the project in several fundamental ways, and a similar questionnaire may be valuable for future database expansion via targeted dissemination to stakeholders with confirmed knowledge of detailed fish passage information at specific hydropower projects.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 3013506
• Report Number(s): ORNL/TM--2025/3748
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

13 HYDRO ENERGY
42 ENGINEERING