Redoubt Weir. Lit To Install, Dark To Run
Solar panels and a Starlink system on a lagoon float run an AI salmon counter at Redoubt Lake, 15 miles by boat from Sitka.
The deck
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The story
Fish and Game put the Redoubt annual subsistence limit at 100 sockeye per household effective July 1st. Jeff Feldpausch of the Sitka Tribe told KCAW it was 50 before, and that the weir is why.
A federal grant titled "Artificial Intelligence for Subsistence Salmon Monitoring and Management" paid $200,000 to install the system. That was installation money. Feldpausch told KCAW there is no funding for the weir right now. Every grant source the Tribe found deals with systems needing remediation.
The deck has the grant title in full, weir counts from 2023 to 2025, and the accuracy number he gave the radio.
What would this weir have to break before a grant program could see it?
What we verified
38 CLAIMS, EACH RE-FETCHED FROM ITS SOURCE BEFORE THIS DECK SHIPPED
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed a fiscal year 2024 Tribal Wildlife Grant to the Sitka Tribe of Alaska titled "Artificial Intelligence for Subsistence Salmon Monitoring and Management".
The Redoubt Lake weir was installed on June 14th, 2026 for the 2026 season.
The weir had counted 7,791 sockeye salmon by June 29th, 2026.
The department said projected escapement for the 2026 Redoubt season exceeds 40,000 sockeye salmon.
Salmon Vision reports a mean average precision of 80.2 percent for its detection model.
Salmon Vision reports detecting 6 salmon species among 17 total species.
Salmon Vision reports its models were trained on over 5 million annotated frames.
Salmon Vision publishes its model code under an MIT open research license and its data and annotations under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Salmon Vision describes itself as a collaborative effort by the Pacific Salmon Foundation, Wild Salmon Center, Simon Fraser University computing sciences and Lumax Ecological Analytics.
Salmon Vision lists the Sitka Tribe of Alaska among its partners, alongside the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
That Tribal Wildlife Grant to the Sitka Tribe of Alaska was $200,000.
The Service described the award as paying to install artificial intelligence enabled video producing automated real time counts of Redoubt Lake sockeye salmon and reducing real time monitoring costs.
The Service's Alaska release said the Sitka Tribe of Alaska would partner with the Wild Salmon Center and the U.S. Forest Service to install the AI enabled video chutes.
The Service said it was awarding more than $1.3 million in Tribal Wildlife Grants to federally recognized Tribes in Alaska in that round.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game raised the annual subsistence limit for Redoubt Bay and Lake sockeye salmon to 100 fish per individual or household.
The same emergency order set the Redoubt subsistence possession limit at 25 sockeye salmon per individual or household.
The same order set the Redoubt sport bag and possession limit at 6 sockeye salmon.
The liberalized Redoubt limits took effect at 12:01 a.m. on July 1st, 2026.
Jeff Feldpausch, resource protection director for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, said there is no funding for the weir right now.
Feldpausch said the Tribe looked high and low for grant sources and all of them deal with systems that need remediation.
Feldpausch said there is lots of money to fix and monitor broken systems but no regular funding for a system that is not broken.
Feldpausch said the computer has learned to count sockeye and the program has reached about a 95 percent confidence interval on counting sockeye through the system.
Feldpausch said a commercial fishery is now taking place at Redoubt that would not happen if the weir were not in place.
Feldpausch said harvesters can now take up to 100 sockeye a year, up from 50, and that this would not have happened without the weir.
Feldpausch said conflicts between people and bears are emerging because bears cannot fish the weir pool away from where people fish in the saltwater.
Feldpausch said runs at Redoubt were significantly depressed in the early 1980s with around 800 sockeye returning.
KCAW described the Redoubt setup as a white polyethylene plastic chute with a video camera on the side, with a float in the lagoon carrying battery packs, solar panels and a Starlink system.
KCAW reported that data from the Redoubt system is uploaded online immediately and is accessible from the Tribe's office in Sitka.
Redoubt Falls is a 15 mile boat ride from downtown Sitka.
KCAW identified the Redoubt counting system as coming from the British Columbia based company SalmonVision.
Technicians counted nearly 229,000 sockeye entering Redoubt Lake while operating the weir from mid June to late July of 2025.
Redoubt weir counts were 153,406 fish in 2023 and 210,253 in 2024 according to U.S. Forest Service reports.
A researcher found that about 35 percent of all subsistence sockeye harvest in Southeast Alaska happens at Redoubt, based on unpublished Forest Service and Fish and Game data.
The AI camera system at Redoubt captured 2,600 video clips in two and a half weeks during 2025.
Sitka Tribe technicians installed the AI equipment at Redoubt in August 2025 and it was reported as the first in-stream artificial intelligence fish count in Alaska.
Seiners caught about 130,000 sockeye at Redoubt in 2025, the largest commercial harvest there since at least 1985.
The U.S. Forest Service and the Sitka Tribe of Alaska issued a joint bear warning for Redoubt Falls on July 30th, 2026, saying several brown bears including two sows with cubs were frequenting the weir.
No published head to head validation of the Redoubt AI counts against hand counts was found on any of the pages fetched for this run.
Beats
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