Professional Staff

“A love of fish and the aquatic environment is the cornerstone of my passion for ecological science; a passion shared by so many of my colleagues at Kleinschmidt. It’s truly a please to be surrounded with so many talented people working toward the common overarching goal of helping our clients overcome challenges in the markets we serve.”

Bryan is a senior fisheries ecologist and project manager servicing the energy production and transmission industries. He specializes in fish passage assessment, leading and managing large-scale projects on many of the rivers in the northeastern United States and Canada. He regularly leads study efforts involving a wide variety of ecological disciplines including fish assemblage and population evaluations (certified in the principles and techniques of electrofishing by the U.S. Department of the Interior), habitat characterizations and suitability, water quality, instream flow evaluation, and fish passage effectiveness and monitoring.

He has worked with many species, but diadromous fishes are of particular interest to Mr. Apell, spending much of his career studying and improving fish passage initiatives with species such as American Eel, American Shad, River Hearing, Sea Lamprey, Lake and Shortnose sturgeon, and Atlantic Salmon, among others. He regularly participates in the FERC licensing process contributing as the principle investigator and environmental lead responsible for agency consultation, study design and implementation, and budget. Early in his career he developed an interest in sound in the aquatic environment having written technical papers such as Hydroacoustics Technologies for Environmental Assessment at Hydro Projects. He employs hydroacoustic technologies extensively as they pertain to fish behavior monitoring (sound imaging technologies), entrainment estimates (split-beam sonar), fish passage effectiveness (radio and acoustic telemetry), acoustic monitoring of in-water construction activities, hydrodynamic survey (acoustic doppler technologies) and more.

In addition to his technical pursuits Bryan is a certified project manager and a senior member of Kleinschmidt’s project management group. He manages a wide variety of projects, in addition to the aforementioned, he manages design engineering efforts typically related to fish passage infrastructure and ecological services for the energy transmission industry and various municipalities, non-profits, and the government.

Bryan hold a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut and is an active member of the American Fisheries Society.