About PONDSTAT
The PondStat idea was developed after a close friend came to me and asked for help with some data on his pond. Being an engineer and general math geek – who also loves bass fishing – I developed a spreadsheet for him where he could track his 85-acre pond in southern California. To an engineer or anyone who uses Excel on a consistent basis, the spreadsheet was easy and fast. On the other hand, my buddy said it wasn’t “user friendly.”
He was right, the spreadsheet required a lot of data manipulation to provide useful information, even after the data had been entered. He didn’t mind it as long as I was the one reducing the data and sending him nice pretty PDFs with final results. It was then he told me he wanted a form of software where he could come home from a day’s fishing, enter his data and let the software spit out tables and charts that he could then track as well as send to his fisheries biologist for consultation.
The concept sounded good to me, so in 2004 I did a search of the internet and ended up on Bob Lusk’s website, Pond Boss. A search of the message board and a few emails to Bob himself, I found out there was no fisheries software package available for the private pond owner, let alone fisheries biologists.
That’s when I set out to solve the problem. How hard could it be? All I needed was to hire a software designer to build the computational and database portions of the site, build a website and promote it. After two years, three bad experiences with computer programers, and a bunch of money spent, there was still nothing. I had to can the project.
Since that time, I have found an extremely reliable computer guy who has run my other websites since 2021. In late 2024 I approached him with the concept of PondStat and we started working on it. After 20 years, there’s finally a software package that the private pond owner, or fisheries biologist, can use to track the health of their pond or ponds.
The original spreadsheet developed to track my buddy's Oso Lake Fish Data in 2004. Image and data Terry Battisti.
So, what is PondStat and how can it help you?
Fisheries Management Statistics
As mentioned above, PondStat is a statistical software package and database that allows its users to analyze data taken from their pond to determine its health. It uses the same equations the leading fisheries biologists use when conducting studies of this sort. For example,
(1)
Is the “Standard Weight” (WS) equation developed by Wege and Anderson in 1978 for largemouth bass, where L is length in inches. The result given from equation (1) is the weight a fish of a length “L” should weigh. This Standard Weight is then used to determine what the “Relative Weight” (WR) is, or, in other words, how healthy that fish is with respect to its weight. Here’s an example:
According to Wege and Anderson’s Standard Weight (WS) equation, a 15.25-inch largemouth bass should weigh 1.93 pounds. If a bass was caught and it weighed 1.56 pounds, we can calculate Relative Weight (WR) as follows:
(2)
It’s obvious from the result of the Standard Weight equation the fish needs to weigh more. But how far off in weight is it? That’s what WR tells us. The result 0.81 tells us the fish is 19% lower in weight than what it should be for its length. Why is that? This is hard to determine with one fish at one point in time. To determine the health of a fishery, be it a pond, lake, or stream, several fish have to be sampled / caught over a period of time. In other words, the more data the better. For example, after the spawn, WR could drop well below 95% and you have nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if your average WR leading into the spawn is below 95%, you may have a problem.
How to Use PONDSTAT
PondStat isn’t the miracle pill that solves your pond’s problems. It is a tool to help you, the owner, track the condition of the fish that inhabit your pond. If you’re serious about your pond being the best fishery it can be, you most likely have a pond management company or fisheries biologist visit at least once a year. When that company visits, they’ll generally electroshock the pond to determine fish density, forage types and density. Then they’ll take note of aquatic vegetation, pH, Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), Dissolved Oxygen (DO), and other water quality tests. All of these tests are great and can provide useful information to maintain the health of a pond, but for the pond owner that has this done once a year, the results only show that one period in time.
Having talked to many fisheries biologists over the years, their number one problem with doing their job is lack of data. In fact they recommend to their clients a minimum of bi-annual surveys and up to quarterly surveys. Remember, the more data the better.
This is where PondStat fits in.
PondStat allows the pond owner to collect data and track fish health as much as they want. Fish everyday and collect the data. All you need is a measuring board, scale, and your phone. You don’t need to know the math or how to use spreadsheets. Imagine how this could help your biologist, having months of data showing trends in WR through the months and seasons.
So, what can PondStat do? The software is capable of storing your pond data and performing the statistical calculations important to managing your pond. You can input data over the course of months, leaving it for your biologist to use when it’s time, or you can easily create tables and graphs and track your pond’s progress. Depending on the amount of data you feed PondStat will dictate how many types of tracking plots you can generate. Do you want to generate a yearly WR plot for your lake? How about a seasonal WR plot? How about a plot of culling vs. WR? It can all be done as long as you supply the needed information into your database! Do you take water temperature data when you’re on the water? Why not plot water temperature vs. number of fish caught? Yes, PondStat can be used as a fishing log too!
Those are the nuts and bolts of why we came up with PondStat and what it can do. We hope you as users of this community let us know how we’re doing and what we can do to improve on the software and how it works.
Thanks for coming to our site and thanks for choosing PondStat as your pond analysis software.
Sincerely,
Terry Battisti, Ph.D.