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This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a tool for fisheries biomass assessment that fuses airborne LIDAR with ship-borne SONAR data. This is expected to be an improved survey technique that extends a fishery survey area while also increasing the quality of the data that is collected. Phase I will apply the system to two important fisheries issues: the decline of the endangered Stellar Sea Lion population in the presence of commercial fishing; and the need for increased information for salmon life cycle modeling. Both of these issues impact thousands of lives in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The mathematical relationship between LIDAR and SONAR backscatter will be established. A prototype fusion engine will be developed and validated on existing data from the North Pacific. The system will be migrated to a web-based prototype LIDAR-SONAR data fusion engine for use in the fisheries management and scientific communities. A real-time data fusion engine will be deployed for future fish survey operations