Legally, any "Guideline" is not the law, nor are they enforceable regulatory rules. They are suggestions or generally accepted practices, but they are not fail-proof. They can even lead to poor results requiring years of expensive adaptive management improvements. They often look to the past rather than capture more progressive thoughts, so Guidelines by definition don't capture relatively new or creative solutions, or ideas from other parts of the world, no matter how good those ideas not captured in the guidelines may have already proven to be. The Guidelines may represent the best of the past experiences, but they still encourage experimentation, because the best of the past is not good enough in today's changing world. 

Anything that is not printed in the guidelines has, only by the guideline's definition, been deemed "experimental".  However, this does not mean that if something falls outside those guidelines it should be discounted just because it has been labeled experimental. Rather, with climate change, everything in the guidelines is again experimental because the norms are changing and becoming more extreme. Be aware of the guidelines, they can be helpful, but don't be afraid to go outside of them either, indeed its expected - embrace experimental and we will accelerate the advances in native fish recovery. Today, every fish passage site is at least in part "experimental". Check out some of the latest guidelines below.

To add credence to any fish recovery or passage proposal, agency and regulator best practice dictates you will need to site other experts and their studies to support your proposal. We have done some of that work for you. Please feel free to use the list of fish passage studies referenced in the document below, to save you both time and effort finding them, and give yourself more time to read and understand what they teach us about how to improve our collective practices moving forward..