Brandt has worked for CPW at its Brush location for some five years, and her areas of responsibility includes the lower South Platte and the North Fork of the Republican River Basins in northeast Colorado. According to Brandt said there are three primary components to her work for CPW - humans, habitat and biota and hatcheries.
One of the important parts of the human component is to conduct angler creel surveys, a somewhat informal method of fish sampling. For example, if she is out sampling somewhere and sees people fishing, she will ask them what they are catching, if they are happy with their experience, the size of the fish they caught, what they are seeing being caught, etc.
Brandt also conducts intensive creel surveys, from which she can calculate accurate statistics. Information from creel surveys helps to set regulations such as size and bag limits in fishing waters.
Another part of the human component is to work with various angling groups. These groups can provide valuable information about fishing, and also several individuals from these groups volunteer to help with various CPW projects by providing gear and man-hours.
She also works with and interacts with school groups including those as young as first grade to college students, some of whom have helped with projects such as the walleye spawns. She has done a lot of different programs with the Brush High School and also works with irrigation districts and many other agencies.
Brandt said the second component, habitat and biota, allows her to spend nine months out of the year on the water with fish “which can’t be beat.”
This part of the job includes sampling fish, which allows her to determine the status of a fishery from year to year. A variety of methods are used to sample fish as different species of fish are attracted to different gear so Brandt said, “We need to use a lot of different gear types to get a representative sample of the fish community.”
Gear types include trap nets, which catch structure-oriented fish, gill nets, which catch species that cruise throughout the water column, and electrofishing, which stuns the fish for a few seconds, allowing the fish to be processed and put back alive.
In the hatcheries component, Brandt said Colorado produces 150 to 200 million fish between hatchery production and wild spawning operations. Approximately 29 million of these fish are stocked in the territory Brandt covers in northeast Colorado.
In wild spawning operations, fish are caught at a lake or reservoir, and the fish are spawned on site with the eggs shipped to hatcheries. She said striped bass and wiper are spawned with fish from Pawnee Power Plant Lake in Brush.