THALWEG

Team

Small, and close to the water.

Thalweg was designed, written, deployed and maintained by the same person who stands in the river — which is why it works in one.

Founder & Principal Scientist

Eamonn Powers

Fisheries scientist, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Eamonn built Thalweg while studying the lake sturgeon of the Grand River — first because the counting problem was in the way of his own research, and then because it was obviously not only his problem.

His work runs from the wet end to the numerical one: mounting and maintaining acoustic hardware in a spring river, and building the GPU pipeline that turns what it records into tracks a biologist can review. He is the inventor named on Thalweg's provisional patent.

Education
M.S. Biology, Grand Valley State University (expected 2026).
B.S. Wildlife & Fisheries Science, Pennsylvania State University.
Focus
Fisheries hydroacoustics, river monitoring, applied machine learning for acoustic data.
Eamonn Powers in chest waders in the Grand River beside a deployed sonar mount.
Lower Grand River, at the start of the spawning run.

Collaborators

The field data behind Thalweg were collected during a lake sturgeon study on the lower Grand River led by the Grand Rapids Public Museum, with Grand Valley State University and project partners, and supported by the Great Lakes Fishery Trust. Thalweg's software was written independently.

We are actively looking for the next collaboration — specifically, a river Thalweg has never seen, and a fisheries or environmental monitoring programme willing to test whether it holds up there.