SteelheadTracker monitors Columbia Basin steelhead migration using data from DART (Columbia River Data Access in Real Time), PTAGIS (PIT Tag Information System), and USGS stream gauges.
Why trust this? I'm not a mathematician or a fisheries biologist — I'm a fisherman who wanted to know how run timing varies year to year and whether it moves with flow. Working with state-of-the-art AI, that question grew into a roughly 40,000-line Python pipeline: 15+ years of detections from hundreds of thousands of PIT-tagged steelhead, merged with every major dam's daily census, then scored against independent published yardsticks (IDFG run reconstructions, dam-census bounds, smolt-to-adult survival). Where our numbers and the independent ones disagree, the chart says so. The point: the same public data behind DART, made readable.
Adult steelhead are tracked via PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) tags detected at dams and in-river antenna arrays. DART dam counts provide total passage numbers; PIT tag detections reveal which rivers fish are heading to. Where a tag can't be linked to a river, we say so — unresolved fish are shown as unresolved, not guessed.
New Aug 24: every major river now has its own page (tap a river name in Hot Rivers), with run timing, forecast wedge and real PIT travel times; plus the daily "What the data says today" briefing above.
What's new (Aug 2026): after a six-month gap this site got a major overhaul — eight restored charts, corrected ocean-age classification, hatchery and wild estimated separately, new sub-basin destinations (Lochsa, Selway, Lemhi…), repaired confidence intervals, and data current through late August. Every number is now checked against independent published sources (IDFG/ODFW figures, dam censuses) before it ships, and a gate blocks deployment if the checks fail. Full details on the desktop site's About tab.
Data sources: DART · PTAGIS · USGS
Contact: paul.vanvalkenburg@gmail.com