Fishtek Ltd

Fishtek specialises in the design, fabrication and implementation of innovative solutions that restore and improve the aquatic environment, with a focus on fish passage and river restoration. With a multidisciplinary team of engineers, fisheries biologists and environmental scientists, the company delivers projects across a broad range of areas including fish and eel passes, river restoration, screening improvements, fisheries and INNS surveys, and river engineering and design.

Our services broadly fall into the following four areas:

WATER ENGINEERING

Fishtek has a very strong reputation in the the design and implementation of fish passes and eel passes. We design effective routes for migratory species to move upstream and downstream past obstacles such as weirs, dams and hydropower infrastructure. Drawing on extensive engineering expertise, Fishtek designs a wide range of fish pass types tailored to site conditions, including technical baffle passes, vertical slot and pool and traverse passes, and more naturalised solutions such as rock ramps and bypass channels. Our designs are informed by our extensive experience and site-specific constraints, and we ensure that the selected solution not only achieves regulatory compliance and ecological performance, but is also buildable and cost-effective. We have designed over 300 fish passes to date and in the region of 200 eel passes. Our design work also extends to river improvements like weir removals, fish counter designs, bank protection and screening improvements. The latter is an area where we are seeing significantly increased demand and need for our expertise and we are involved in a number of screening improvement projects across the UK.

Eel passes represent a specialist area of expertise, and our work in this area forms part of wider efforts to support the recovery of eel populations. Fishtek develops tailored eel passes that enable both juvenile and adult eels to bypass barriers that would otherwise restrict migration. Designs can be gravity-fed or pump-assisted (“up-and-over”), offering flexibility for a wide range of structures and hydraulic conditions, with a wide range of substrates utilised, depending on the site in question. We also design solutions to improve eel and fish passage at tidal gates, including our patented ‘tidal gate damper’ (TGD).

ENVIRONMENTAL AND FISHERIES CONSULTANCY

Fishtek started out in the area of fisheries consultancy, providing advice to the hydropower sector. Since then, our experience and expertise has broadened substantially and we are able to offer support and services in areas that include barrier assessments, fisheries and habitat surveys, invasive species surveys, fisheries impact assessments, environmental flow determination, fish rescues, investigations into patterns of fish migration and R&D into the interaction between fisheries and hydropower.

RIVER AND HABITAT RESTORATION

Our work on fish passage is part of wider ongoing efforts to improve freshwater habitats and rectify the damage caused by past hisotorical mis-management of our rivers and streams. Beyond fish passage, a great deal of effort is focused on improving rivers and aquatic habitat by removing redundant weirs, reinstating natural river channels, reversing detrimental river management schemes like gravel dredging and moving to the use of ‘natural flood management’ over hard engineered flood management. We have a broad range of expertise in all of these areas which complements our work on barrier mitigation and river engineering.

CONSTRUCTION, INCLUDING FABRICATION AND INSTALLATION

Fishtek has delivered the installation and construction on site of our designed fish passage solutions since we first started designing fish and eel passes almost twenty years ago. To date we have installed over 120 eel passes, a huge range of fish counter systems (of a wide variety of types), fish passage easements and abstraction screens. Our work on fabricated structures includes the fabrication and installation of screening upgrades for the water sector and we have delivered large screening upgrade projects at a number of sites. We also deliver a range of river and habitat improvement projects, including weir removals, gravel augmentation schemes and geomorphological improvements. Our ‘turn key’ offering is in high demand and the fact that we regularly build what we have designed makes us better placed to design solutions that are cost-effective, buildable and maintainable.