We are offering six different Short Courses and Workshops during Monday May 4th, 2026 at the UC Davis Conference Center. Please find descriptions, costs and details for each of them in the text below. The workshops are offered on a first come first serve basis. Registration is required and you can only register and submit fees during your general conference registration process.
1. Planning, Implementing, and Adaptively Managing Aquatic Reintroductions for Long-term Success: A Pacific Salmon Case Study
Instructors: Toby Kock, U.S. Geological Survey and John Ferguson and Mike Garello Anchor QEA/HDR, Inc.
Cost: $200/person includes lunch and coffee breaks.
Max Capacity: 40 participants
Length: Full day (approximately 6 hrs)
Description: Aquatic reintroductions are becoming increasingly common as resource managers seek to ameliorate negative effects from human disturbances and recover imperiled native species. For long-term success, careful planning is required to address policy concerns, identify and secure a durable funding source, select appropriate strategies, and monitor/adaptively manage to make incremental improvements aimed at optimizing overall outcomes of the effort. This workshop will utilize the expertise of local instructors with extensive reintroduction experience from Pacific salmon reintroductions conducted throughout western North America to provide recommendations and lessons learned for participants. The workshop will emphasize the importance of working to address policy issues, acquire reliable sources of long-term funding, acquiring site-specific foundational knowledge, developing strategies for effective implementation planning and monitoring, and adaptively managing to increase the probability of long-term success.
2. Integrated Approaches to Fish Passage Design and Technology
Instructor: Vincent Autier, McMillen SAS
Cost: $200/person includes lunch and coffee breaks
Capacity: 10 to 60 participants
Length: Full day (approximately 6 hrs)
Description: McMillen is proposing a comprehensive workshop on fish passage to be held at the International Fish Passage Conference at UC Davis. This full-spectrum session will guide participants through the principles, technologies, and practices used to achieve upstream and downstream connectivity at hydroelectric dams and other migration barriers. The workshop will be organized into four major modules: (1) an introduction to fish passage, (2) technical pool fishways, (3) downstream fish passage, and (4) trap-and-haul systems and emerging technologies.
The first section will provide historical context and an overview of the ecological and regulatory drivers behind fish passage design. The session on technical pool fishways will cover the major types of engineered passage systems, design principles, hydraulic considerations, biological performance, and the relative advantages and limitations of each approach. The downstream passage module will address sources of injury and mortality for migrating fish and explore mitigation strategies ranging from improved screening and bypass systems to the growing role of dam removal in restoring passage. The final section will focus on trap-and-haul systems and new technologies that are reshaping the field, including innovations in fish guidance, sorting, and transport.
Drawing on extensive design experience and applied research from the Pacific Northwest, the Columbia River Basin, and international case studies, this workshop emphasizes lessons learned from real-world projects and peer-reviewed literature. By the end of the session, participants will have a comprehensive understanding of the suite of technical and operational solutions available to provide effective river connectivity—whether at large hydropower facilities or smaller obstructions. The workshop is intended for engineers, biologists, managers, and students seeking to deepen their understanding of modern fish passage design and implementation.
3. Assessing upstream fish passage at barriers
Instructors: Mark Gard, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Ross Taylor, Ross Taylor and Associates
Cost: $100 includes lunch and coffee breaks
Capacity: 10 to 30 participants
Length: Full day (approximately 6 hrs)
Description: The workshop, sponsored by the California Fish Passage Forum, will include both a field and classroom component. The first part of the workshop will address rapid barrier assessment techniques used to assess natural features or manmade structures for their ability to provide fish passage for anadromous fishes. The second portion of the workshop will focus on using tools such as FishXing, 1 and 2-D Hec-Ras to determine the barrier status (total, temporal, partial or not a barrier) for upstream passage of anadromous salmonids. Topics to cover include what data to collect in the field, using LiDAR to develop 2D Hec-Ras models, and using streamstats to quantify low and high fish passage flows. The last portion of the workshop will be an interactive tutorial of using the National Aquatic Barrier Inventory and Prioritization Tool (aquaticbarriers.org).
4. It’s steep, but fish will probably pass: Designing steep streams for fish passage
Instructors: Andre Zimmermann, PhD, PGeo, Northwest Hydraulic Consultants (NHC), and Barry Chilibeck, Northwest Hydraulic Consultants (NHC)
Cost: $200/person includes lunch and coffee breaks.
Capacity: 15 to 45 participants
Length: Full day (6 hrs approximately)
Note: The target audience is for designers/practitioners and also those who oversee channel design. Students should bring a laptop for use on the test cases
Description: This course will focus on fish passage design for steep channels (gradients above 3%). In natural systems, steep streams dissipate energy through step-pool and cascade morphologies that enhance bed roughness, promote bed stability and result in fish passage. Restoration practitioners have historically lacked a rigorous, experimentally grounded framework for designing these features.
Northwest Hydraulic Consultants (NHC) has developed a tool for a process-based methodology to design steep channels rooted in over ten years of research and implementation. NHC’s approach has recently been documented for WSDOT and a publicly available tool has been released for use by practitioners. This course will introduce participants to steep stream fundamentals and how designers can use NHC’s steep channel design methodology and its accompanying design tool to design channels for fish passage. The tool will be applied to some example design scenarios. Fish passage design considerations and examples of applications will be discussed.
Course Objectives and Skill Transfer
• Describe geomorphic characteristics and processes of ‘steep streams’
• Fish passage considerations and challenges in these systems
• Compare definitions of channel stability
• Steep channel design tool:
o Identify tool inputs and outputs
o Describe differences in the tool’s two design methods
o Explain the implications of selecting a ‘target probability of instability’
o Compare design tool outputs to the range of experimental data
o Learn how to apply professional judgement to accommodate site constraints/goals
• Learn how to implement the tool for construction ready designs
• Apply the steep channel design tool to test case
• Explain the role of the ‘stream channel designer’
5. Integrating Fish Physiology into Fish Passage Design: From Laboratory Insights to Applied Solutions
Instructors: Nann Fangue; Anna Steel; Kelly Hannan, University of California, Davis and Dave Smith, US Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center
Cost: $50 includes transport from and back to Conference Center
Capacity: 10 to 30 participants
Location: Center for Aquatic Biology and Aquaculture
Length: Half day. 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Description: Designing effective fish passage requires an understanding of both fish biology and hydraulic design principles. This half-day workshop will bridge the gap between fish physiology research and applied engineering solutions for improving connectivity in aquatic systems.
The session will begin in a classroom setting with an overview of how physiological tools and metrics such as respirometry, swimming performance studies, tail-beat frequency, heart rate monitoring, telemetry, and accelerometer tagging can inform our understanding of fish performance under varying hydraulic conditions. We will discuss how these metrics are used to evaluate energetic costs, motivation, and behavioral thresholds that influence passage success across species and life stages.
We will then highlight how these biological data can be integrated into hydraulic and computational models to simulate fish responses to turbulence, velocity fields, etc. This combined physiological and engineering approach provides a framework for designing or retrofitting fishways and bypass structures that align with fish performance capacities rather than solely hydraulic targets.
The workshop will conclude with a guided tour of the UC Davis Fish Conservation Physiology Lab, where participants will see ongoing research in action, including flume systems used for swimming and turbulence studies, respirometry setups, and more.
This session is designed for biologists, engineers, and resource managers seeking to incorporate physiological insights into fish passage planning, design, and evaluation. Participants will leave with a conceptual toolkit for translating laboratory and modeling results into applied passage solutions that improve connectivity from headwaters to estuaries.
6. Assess, Protect and Restore Resilient Rivers
Instructor: Mary Khoury, The Nature Conservancy
Cost: $50 includes coffee break and snacks.
Capacity: 10 to 50 participants
Length: Half day (approximately 3-4 hrs)
Note: Participants will need a laptop computer, internet access and access to power.
Description: Not even a tenth of rivers in the conterminous United States are under conservation: 7% are resilient for biodiversity in a changing climate and sufficiently protected, 23% are resilient and not sufficiently protected, 7% are restorable (close to resilient) and protected; and the rest (63%) are in need of a lot of restoration and are unprotected. The Nature Conservancy’s Center for Resilient Conservation Science mapped freshwater resilience and brought this together with information on freshwater protection in the Resilient River Explorer web tool (https://www.maps.tnc.org/resilientrivers) to give managers information to assess, protect and restore rivers and streams. The workshop will provide hands-on training in how to apply our information to conserve resilient freshwater systems using the Resilient River Explorer. In this workshop, you will:
Assess
1. Understand freshwater resilience and find out how resilient your river system is.
2. Identify what needs improvement for your river to be more resilient.
3. Prioritize where to focus your conservation efforts using the Freshwater Resilient and Connected Network.
4. Assess gaps in conservation for both protection and restoration of a given river.
Protect
5. Evaluate protection opportunities based on the resilience of freshwater ecosystems.
Restore
6. Visualize the primary restoration needed to improve resilience.
7. Evaluate the benefits of a specific dam removal or series of dams.
Access data and reports
8. Download the data and integrate into your spatial analysis.
9. Access the full methods report.
10. Access case studies and frequently asked questions.
Give Feedback
The final part of the workshop will be an opportunity for you to provide feedback and input to us about how this tool meets and doesn’t meet your decision-making support needs.
The workshop is intended for professionals mainly and students are welcome. We imagine this content being most relevant to managers who are involved in the strategic planning for river and wetland restoration and protection. No prior experience with the Resilient River Explorer is required. We will explain the key concepts underlying freshwater resilience but will not be providing detailed information on the methods during the workshop.