Rookwood Weir Project Baseline Monitoring 2022-2023

AFPS worked in conjunction with Sunwater to undertake pre-construction sampling in the Fitzroy River Catchment prior to the construction of the Rookwood Weir. The project aimed to gather baseline data to establish the condition of the fish communities of the river system and will permit the future identification of any changes to the fish communities as a result of the construction of the weir and/or installation of associated offset infrastructure.

Electrofishing was used to identify the species present, species requiring upstream or downstream movement and how the populations change over time. In addition to sampling, tagging of fish with passive integrated transponder tags (PIT) was undertaken, to establish a population of fish that can be detected at readers installed at a number of fishways in the system.

More than 11,000 fish from 33 species were sampled during the monitoring and nearly 700 fish PIT tagged for future tracking.