Pond Boss Forums INTRO New Forum Member Introduction New Pond Boss Member and Advertisor

Hi Everyone,

My name is Terry Battisti and I have been a lurker for a long time. I've never had a pond of my own but I was introduced to pond management when a close friend of mine acquired a 100-acre lake in southern California back in 2004. He's a member here and joined back in 2004 when he first started working on his pet project.

My buddy called me one day to ask if I could help him with some pond management equations. By education and career, I'm an engineer and love math. I also have been a rabid bass angler my whole life. So I was interested in how fisheries biologists used math and statistics to better a lake or pond's fishery. I knew nothing about fisheries biology but math is math. LOL.

I developed an Excel spreadsheet for my buddy that calculated WR using WS (LMB and BG), AVG WR, and Standard Deviation of WR. It also automatically plotted Actual Weight vs. Length with the Standard Weight line, AVG WR vs Date (with error bars for WR), AVG WR vs Bin Sizes. He sent me a few months of data, I plugged it in, copied daily data produced into their own separate sheets, and sent it to him. It wasn't what he wanted. LOL. He wanted a software program where all he had to enter was length, weight, weather data and a couple water quality parameters he was collecting.

I told him he wanted a software package and he agreed.

By this time I had been reading the forums here and saw that there might be a need for a software program that did what he wanted and more. I contacted a programmer, paid them some money and they disappeared. That happened two more times and by year two, I had to let it rest. My day job was taking too much time and my bank account needed to recover.

In 2020 I met my current computer guy who helped me put together a couple bass-fishing related sites I run. He's been awesome and very trustworthy over the last six years. So, in the middle of 2025 I sent him my business plan for PondStat and asked if he was interested in working on it with me. He agreed and a year later we have launched PondStat.

The platform was designed for pond owners who want to take more control over their pond via fish math and statistics. All you have to enter to make it work is length and weight (in English or metric units) and it produces "nearly" all the data you need to keep track of the fish in your pond. I say "nearly" because by only entering length and weight, you're missing some important aspects of pond management.

Game species it tracks through their WS equations are: LMB, SMB, BG, CNBG, RSF, GSF, CCF, WAE, WCP, BCP, RBT, and HSB. If there's a need, we can add more species in less than 5 minutes. Forage it tracks are BG, GSF, RSF, TFS, GZS, FHM, GDF, RBT, and more. You can also track forage with predators through the integral graphing within the platform.

Other aspects of the platform are: weather tracking, water quality tracking, PSD, CPUE (electrofishing, seine, fyke net, and gillnet), bin sizes, feeders and feed rates, fertilization, stocking of forage and predators, tagged fish, #fish caught/angler*hr, time fishing, and a lot more.

We debuted the software at the American Fisheries Society conference in Columbus, OH last week and it was well received by the pond management companies there as well as state DNRs and universities.

That was a lengthy intro of PondStat and a short intro for me. I'm just a guy who loves fish and math. I'm an engineer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, TN and when I'm not doing that, I'm fishing or thinking about how to better fisheries through math. I hope you take the time to check out the site and read what we have to offer. If you're interested, I can set anyone on Pond Boss up with a two-week trial. You can find the site at PondStat and you can contact me at info@pondstat.com.

Thank you all for reading this long winded post. All the best with your ponds!

Terry Battisti
Owner: PondStat

Welcome to Pond Boss, Terry!!

I lived in Oak Ridge, TN from '75-'78 when my Dad was in charge of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project for Westinghouse. Granted I was only 5-8 years old at the time, but I sure did love it there. The sausage biscuits at the Jefferson Pharmacy, Big Ed's Pizza, the pool at Country Club Estates....wonderful times!!!

Welcome!

Finally, someone else who admits to being an engineer.

Thank you for the warm welcome Sunil! Dang, the Jefferson Pharmacy and Big Ed's are still kicking out great food! They're institutions.....

I've lived all over the U.S. and Oak Ridge is the place I feel most at home. Great weather all year and tons of water!

Thanks agaian!

Terry

LOL Theo! We enginerds need to stick together. :-D Thank you for the warm welcome and along with you, I hope to add an engineering flare to Pond Boss. :-)

Terry