Scientists achieve first tracking of salmon from headwaters in Rockies through Pacific...(River while green sturgeon (A HREF http:...)

Since sturgeon meander between estuaries, a continuous POST-type system is the only way to follow these fish from, for example, the Klamath estuary to the Columbia estuary to the Fraser estuary.

Data collected on the POST array are also being used by the US National Marine Fisheries Service to develop a court-ordered critical habitat designation to protect green sturgeon.

In 2006, researchers tagged returning adult sockeye salmon (www.eol.org/taxa/17154705) in marine waters 215 km from their destination river mouth to try to learn why up to 90% of these late-run fish changed their behaviour - leaving the ocean to migrate upriver as much as one and a half months earlier than normal; a change that has caused an estimated 4 million fish to perish over the last decade.

POST is also developing data clearinghouse and mapping and visualization services for independent researchers working with acoustic tags.

For example, in Puget Sound, Washington, several university, federal, state and tribe researchers are investigating Chinook and coho salmon (www.eol.org/taxa/17059924) and other species using their own acoustic tags and detectors. Many of them provide their data to POST and, in return, receive detections of fish passing by POST receivers.

A similar arrangement is in place with some members of a consortium of organizations using their own array in the San Francisco Bay estuary to investigate reasons behind a stock collapse that led to extremely costly closures of California's entire coast-wide salmon fishery in 2008.