Understanding abundance is essential to assessing Pacific Lamprey status, and yet this metric remains elusive for much of the species’ distribution. Most of the current monitoring methods are labor-intensive and expensive (e.g., trapping, electrofishing) or offer only qualitative, presence vs absence data (e.g.,eDNA). While optical counters have shown promise in some lamprey passage structures, where their backs break the water surface, there is still a pressing need for quantitative and cost-effective methods to assess the relative abundance and passage attempts of lamprey in other situations, including while the Lamprey are completely submerged at and near artificial barriers throughout its range. We will advance and evaluate a novel detection tool (smart panel) for assessing the abundance of adult Pacific Lamprey. The smart panel was developed for detecting adult sea lamprey by identifying lamprey oral attachment. The smart panel captures the characteristic pressure profile of Lamprey attachment and machine learning-derived algorithms are used for automated identification. Smart panels will be customized for detecting Pacific Lamprey. They will be deployed to count Lamprey on the wetted-wall passage structure at the Fish Ecology Research Lab (FERL) facility at Bonneville Dam. They will also be deployed in the collection structures of holding tanks at the BPA-owned hatchery, to assess their ability to capture the relative abundance among tanks with high and low lamprey densities. This project will lay the foundation for management-scale field deployment of the smart sensor panel technology at sites within different RMUs.