LoRa Fish Tracking System — Aquaculture Monitoring in Open Water
An underwater acoustic + LoRa system tracking tagged fish across a 200-hectare lake, monitoring water quality at 12 depths, and automating feeding — increasing fish yield by 28% for a Norwegian aquaculture client.
⚠The Problem
A Norwegian aquaculture company operating a 200-hectare lake had no visibility into where fish congregated, whether dissolved oxygen levels were safe at different depths, or when to feed for optimal growth. Manual water sampling once daily missed critical overnight deoxygenation events that were killing fish. Feed was distributed on a fixed schedule regardless of fish location and appetite, wasting 30% of feed stock.
💡Our Solution
We deployed a network of 12 solar-powered floating buoy stations equipped with ESP32 nodes, multi-parameter water quality sensors (DO, pH, temperature, turbidity) at 3 depths each, and acoustic hydrophones. Fish are tagged with micro acoustic transponders that emit a unique ID every 30 seconds. Hydrophones triangulate each fish's position. All data aggregates over LoRa to a central gateway, then transmits to AWS IoT Core via 4G. A Lambda function runs fish position triangulation algorithms. The React dashboard shows a live lake map with fish density heatmaps, water quality depth profiles, and an automated feeding trigger when fish density exceeds a configurable threshold in the feeding zone.
🔗System Architecture
Fish Tags (acoustic) → Hydrophone Buoys → LoRa Mesh → 4G Gateway → AWS IoT Core → Lambda → InfluxDB → React DashboardTech Stack
- ESP32 waterproof nodes
- Ultrasonic acoustic transponders (fish tags)
- DO sensor (dissolved oxygen)
- pH sensor
- Temperature & turbidity sensors
- Underwater acoustic receivers (hydrophones)
- Solar-powered floating buoy stations
- LoRa (custom 433 MHz mesh between buoys)
- MQTT over 4G backhaul (buoy to cloud)
- Acoustic telemetry (fish to hydrophone)
- AWS IoT Core
- InfluxDB (water quality time-series)
- Lambda (fish position triangulation)
- S3 (raw acoustic data)
- React dashboard with lake map overlay
- Fish movement heatmaps
- Water quality trend charts per depth
Key Features
Results Delivered
- 28% increase in fish yield due to optimized feeding
- 22% reduction in feed waste (demand-driven vs. schedule-driven feeding)
- 100% lake coverage with 12 buoy stations
- DO alerts detected 3 overnight deoxygenation events in first month (previously undetected)
- Zero fish mortality events since system deployment
- Regulatory compliance data automatically generated monthly
Technologies
Who This Is For
Fish farms, aquaculture companies, lake management authorities, fisheries departments
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