Abstract
In Canada, the Fisheries Act requires all water takers to avoid, mitigate and offset fish losses. To satisfy the act’s requirements, operators of power plants are required to undertake habitat restoration projects to compensate for fish impinged and entrained at cooling water intake structures. Scaling the quantity of restoration needed, and measuring whether adequate compensation has been achieved, requires a metric that expresses the losses and gains in comparable units. Development of such a metric is especially difficult in the case of power plants, because the losses often consist of a mix of species and life stages that are very different from those produced by technically feasible restoration projects. This paper documents the method that has been developed for quantifying offsets for impingement and entrainment at the Bruce Generating Stations on the eastern shore of Lake Huron, and demonstrates how the method is being used to estimate the offset to be provided by removal of a dam on the nearby Saugeen River.
Highlights
The Canadian Fisheries Act was amended in 2012 to establish Fisheries Protection Provisions that protect ongoing fishery productivity
Using GIS technology, the size of this area is estimated to be 94.3 ha, or ~10 times the area needed to replace I&E losses at the Bruce Generating Stations. It appears from these calculations that removal of the Truax Dam should provide an increase in fish production far in excess of the amount required to offset I&E losses at the Bruce Generating Stations, the calculations were based on literature-derived estimates of initial biomass density (Binitial) and fractional increase in biomass density (ΔB) due to dam removal
The goal of the Canadian Fisheries Act is to ensure that development activities do not reduce the productive capacity of fish habitat in Canadian waters
Summary
The Canadian Fisheries Act was amended in 2012 to establish Fisheries Protection Provisions that protect ongoing fishery productivity. The EA model can be used to calculate offset requirements that satisfy the requirements of the Canadian Fisheries Act. For this purpose, the most straightforward approach would be to express both the losses from impingement and entrainment and the gains from stocking or restoration in terms of age-1 equivalents.
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