NRTG’s MicroCourses offer a dynamic training pathway that’s as flexible as it is enriching to build expertise. Our Advanced Electrofishing MicroCourse, spanning four hours, delivers in-depth training in an easily digestible format. It’s designed to maximize your skills for immediate application.
Backpack electrofishing is one of the most commonly used fish capture techniques in freshwater, yet to be effective it must be done with strategy and care. The standard certification programs, while necessary and essential, focus on the safety aspects and how to conduct this form of fish sampling in a safe manner. Left out, however, are strategies and tactics to actually capture the wild fish in a stream. To assist practitioners in capturing more fish when doing this work, NRTG’s Advanced Electrofishing MicroCourse provides students with lessons learned over decades on how to effectively capture fish using this tool.
The emphasis of this course is on:
- Approaching the water and fish: Fish are finely tuned to their environment, able to detect subtle vibrations in the water and many species with some degree of electro-receptivity. Being able to stealthily approach them within their own environment is essential to reasonable catches. Some ways of doing this will be presented.
- Reading the water: Fish are not distributed uniformly through a stream section, they segregate by species and age-class among the micro-habitats. Understanding this and being able to read the water for fish habitat and stealthy access to those habitats allows an operator to focus efforts on more likely habitat and increase their catch.
- Electrofisher settings: The certification courses introduce the settings to limit harming the fish. But understanding and fine tuning of the settings will increase your catch. To use a metaphor, the basic certification is giving you the keys to a sports car but limiting you to using it for city driving; this course will present ways to refine the settings to allow you to take the car out on the highways.
With an understanding of the principles presented in this course, and future practice in streams, your crew will collect data that is more representative of fish presence and abundance, community structure, and size classes present within a waterway.
Course will be 4 hours long.
Instructor Profile
Dave Evans
Dave Evans is an Aquatic Specialist and Project Manager with over 25 years of experience in fisheries and aquatic resources as a technician, instructor, consultant and regulator. He has extensive experience conducting and overseeing fish habitat and inventory studies as well as environmental impact assessments in western Canada and has also completed aquatic studies in the US Pacific Northwest and northern Canada. He has provided project management, planning, and permitting expertise to numerous projects in transportation, infrastructure, oil and gas and government sectors, to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and industry best management practices while also providing practical, cost-effective solutions for clients. He is currently working on several watershed restoration plans focusing on species at risk in the east slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains including aquatic habitat restoration and monitoring, water quality improvement, fish relocation and spawning habitat enhancement.